parlormaid. On this night the Kanaka acted excellently as a butler, and crept softly round the table, attending to the needs of the diners. He was an admirable servant, deft and handy, but his blue-lined face and squat figure together with the obtrusively golden halo, rather worried Mrs. Jasher. And, indeed, in spite of custom, Lucy also felt uncomfortable when this gnome hovered at her elbow. It looked as though one of the fantastical idols from the museum below had come to haunt the living.
“I do not like that Golliwog,” breathed Mrs. Jasher to her host, when Cockatoo was at the sideboard. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Imagination, my dear lady, pure imagination. Why should we not have a picturesque animal to wait upon us?”
“He would wait picturesquely enough at a cannibal feast,” suggested Archie, with a laugh.
“Don't!” murmured Lucy, with a shiver. “I shall not be able to eat my dinner if you talk so.”
“Odd that Hope should say what he has said,” observed Braddock confidently to the widow. “Cockatoo comes from a cannibal island, and doubtless has seen the consumption of human flesh. No, no, my dear lady, do not look so alarmed. I don't think he has eaten any, as he was taken to Queensland long before he could participate in such banquets. He is a very decent animal.”
“A very dangerous one, I fancy,” retorted Mrs. Jasher, who looked pale.
“Only when he loses his temper, and I'm always able to suppress that when it is at its worst. You are not eating your meat, my dear lady.”
“Can you wonder at it, and you talk of cannibals?”
“Let us change the conversation to cereals,” suggested Hope, whose appetite was of the best—“wheat, for instance. In this queer little village I notice the houses are divided by a field of wheat. It seems wrong somehow for corn to be bunched up with houses.”
“That's old Farmer Jenkins,” said Lucy vivaciously; “he owns three or four acres near the public-house and will not allow them to be built over, although he has been offered a lot of money. I noticed myself, Archie, the oddity of finding a
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