The Salamanca Corpus: Yeoman Fleetwood (1900 ... - Gredos

The Salamanca Corpus: Yeoman Fleetwood (1900)
really attending, and then began, reading slowly, and very distinctly, and running his
forefinger under each wavering line. There was an expectant pause when he concluded.
"Is that all, Master Simon?" inquired Jane in an ominous voice. She had brushed very
energetically for the last moment or two, but in his excitement he had not noticed the
fact.
"Yes, Jane," returned Simon, with modest triumph. He tried to screw round his head
again, but she held him fast by the curls.
"Well then," cried Jane, "all I can say is thou'rt a nasty, cross-tempered, interferin’ little
lad. Who told thee to meddle in other folks affairs? Pokin' thy ugly little nose wheer it
wasn't wanted,and spyin' and pryin’ that gate. Hold thy head still I tell thee,"
emphasising
[10]
the command with a sharp rap with the back of the brush. Simon was amazed and
bitterly disappointed. He did not mind the back of the brush but he was pierced to the
heart by Jane's ingratitude.
"I thought you liked thinking about your sins," he explained; but Jane cut him short with
a peremptory command to hold his din — she'd had enough of that long tongue of his
for once— did he never hear about Tell-Tale-Tit, whose tongue should be slit? —and
sarve him reet, too! Castin’ up about an owd bowl as wasna worth tuppence.
Simon keenly felt the injustice of her treatment, but he endured it in silence; he even
submitted without a struggle to the twisting up of his hair in curl papers — a ceremony
on which Jane insisted even though it was Sunday night — though he felt in his sore
heart that no greater depth of degradation could be reached, unless, indeed, it were the
final ignominy of having his top-knot kept in place by one of Jane's hair-pins.
He went to bed much puzzled — conscious, in fact, of a general upheaval of his
preconceived notions of equity. He had been scolded and slapped and curled as though
he were naughty; yet he had a vague suspicion that if anyone were naughty it really was
Jane.
Those curls of his were the bane of his life, and he was only delivered from them on his
sixth birthday, which was eventful in more ways than one. To begin with his father