Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/39

“‘Why are you making no more songs?’ I said to him in a tone like that. ‘Why are you making no more songs?’ ‘I have grown to be a man,’ he answered, ‘and there be no songs in a man. Only children make songs—children and idiots.’ Pest on him! It’s an idiot himself, is the thought is on me. But what did he say to you, the old white-beard?”

“Why, you see, I’m going to the Indies and—”

“The Indies, and are you? Ah, well—I was at London once. And all the people at London are thieves, dirty thieves. There was a man with a board and little flat sticks on it. ‘Try your skill, friend?’ he says. ‘What stick has a black mark on the underside of it?’ ‘That one,’ says I; and so it was. But the next time—Ah, well, he was a thief, too; all of them thieves.

“People there are at London, and they do nothing but drive about and about in carriages, up one street and down another, bowing to each other, while good men sweat out their lives in the fields and the mines to keep them bowing there. What chance have I or you, say, with all the fine, soft places taken up by robbers? And can you tell me the thieving price of an egg at London?”

“I must take this road now,” said Henry. “I must go home.”

“Indies.” The road-mender sighed with longing. Then he spat in the trail. “Ah, well—I’ll stake it’s all thieves there, too.”

The night was very black when Henry came at last to the poor hut where Elizabeth lived. There