Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/29

Rh rabbit loppeting along over the white under the trees. Well, after I'd been walking some way, a big man cracking a whip in front of a horse and a manure-cart caught me up, and I walked beside him a little, for he had a nice face, till he spoke to me. And then we got on so well together that I told him a great many things that I had read in books about lions, and tigers, and rhinoceroses, and boa-constrictors and many other animals; and, at last, that I myself was writing a book, in which a good many of these things I had been telling him were to be introduced; but more especially I told him about the snakes, some of which were to try to stop Jugurtha in a secret passage as he was coming to kill his brother. For Jugurtha was the name of the hero. He was an illegitimate son of Mastanabal, king of Numidia: that meant that his father and mother weren't married; but in those days (many, many hundreds of years before our blessed Lord came) people sometimes did have children without being married. I had read about some others like that, in the Classical Dictionary.

But the carter kept silence and I, fearing from this and a look I had taken at his face, that there was some weakness in this early stage of my book, hastened to add that I knew it was a little funny, that part, but as it happened hundreds of years before our blessed Lord came or any of us were born, perhaps it wouldn't matter so much, after all? The carter agreed that 'it was odd, too;—at they early times!' Which rather relieved me.

It couldn't have been much further on than that, that I said good-bye to him and turned back to get home again. But I lost my way.

It was colder now, and darker. The sunlight had gone away from everything but a few clouds behind overhead, and, after a little, when I turned to look, it had gone away from all of them but two. I trudged on again. After another little, I began to feel my legs tired, and turned back again to see about the sunlight. It was all gone now. Then I wished I was at home. But the shadows were all coming down thicker and thicker, and the road was so slippery, and