Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/42



Occasionally, some acquaintance or friend of an earlier day would spend a few days or a week with her. One lady, especially, who, at the time when Delsarte was fashionable, had taught his method, was often favoured with an invitation, and Sadi would converse with her by the hour about the French Master and his Message, as she called it. Then, if it were summer, robed in Grecian garments cut from pale-green cheese-cloth, they would stand on the grass underneath a spreading crab-apple tree, to avoid the direct rays of the sun, and wave their arms and sway their bodies in a manner calculated to give the butcher's boy fits, whenever he passed the gate and saw them. This picture of his large-boned aunt, formidable in appearance but gentle at heart, and the stout Miss Perkins, who reached about to Sadi's arm-pit, delsarting on the lawn was one of Harold's earliest memories.

Until Harold was seven Sadi had kept him in kilts, although the boys of his epoch were usually put into baby-trousers at the age of two. These kilts and his long curls were frequently the object of attention and scorn from passing lads, who.