Here are the quotations for the coming week (March 15th to 21st):
1. 'Have it as you've a mind to,' he was saying, 'but the vivers of her roots they hold the bank together. If you grub her out, the bank she'll all come tearing down, an' next floods the brook'll all swarve up. But have it as you've a mind...'
2. ...The brook she'd crep' up on us, an' she kep' creepin' upon us till we was workin' knee deep in the shallers, cuttin' an' pookin' an pullin' what we could get to o' the rubbbish. There was a middlin' lot comin' down-stream, too - cattle-bars an' hop-poles and odds-end bats, all poltin' down together...'
3. ...'Twas hot an' windy for weeks, an' the streets stinkin' o' dried 'orse-dung blowin' from side to side an' lyin' level with the kerb. We don't get that nowadays. I 'ad my 'ol'day just before hoppin', an' come down 'ere to stay with Bessie again. She noticed I'd lost flesh, an' was all poochy under the eyes.'...
The sources of this week's extracts (March 8th to 14th) are as follows:
1. (Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass...) This is from "Without Benefit of Clergy" in Life's Handicap.
2. ('That summer the Ould Rig’ment did not use their own Clink, bekase the cholera was hangin’ about there like Mildew on wet boots...) This is from "My Lord the Elephant" in Many Inventions.
3. ('I said, knowing what the Major had brought me out for, - ”The Boy died of cholera. We were with him at the time...') This is from "Thrown Away" in Plain Tales from the Hills.
In the New Readers' Guide we have just published notes by Alastair Wilson on "The Brushwood Boy", the last story in The Day's Work.
Good wishes to all, John R
