Hungry Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

haven’t you ? But they won’t touch the wild part at the top, and they won’t spoil the lake. We can still go there and enjoy ourselves.”
    “If I were Hungry Hill I should be angry,” said the child. “I should want to slay the human beings who dared interfere with me, You know how the hill looks in winter, John, when the clouds are upon it, and the rain drives down. Like a giant, frowning. If I were my father I would not have sunk my mine there, I would have found another place.”
    “Yes, but other places don’t have the copper, sweetheart.”
    “Then I would go without the copper.”
    “Don’t you want to be rich, and marry an Earl, like Eliza?”
    “Not in the least. I am like Barbara, I only want all of us to be happy.”
    “I should be happy if I didn’t owe money to half the tradesmen in Oxford,” sighed John.
    “Are you very much in debt? It’s a bad thing, I have heard my father say, to owe money, especially to people in a lower station than oneself.”
    “It isn’t bad. It’s merely irritating.
    Don’t let’s talk about it any more. I’ll carry you to bed,” said John, who always changed the conversation when he drew near to matters affecting his conscience, and taking the little girl in his arms, he carried her to the room she still shared with the old nurse Martha.
    Martha was at. supper, and Jane undressed solemnly before her brother, folding up her clothes as she had been taught to do, and she knelt at his knee and said her prayers with a devout intensity and a lack of embarrassment that wrung his heart. When he had kissed her and tucked her up, he went down the corridor to the drawing-room, but paused outside the door without entering. Somehow Eliza’s chatter and Henry’s good-natured teasing would have jarred upon him this evening, and turning round he went down by the back staircase, and so out of the side-door to the stables across the yard, where his bitch Nellie lay, with her litter of puppies.
    Tim the stable-lad was awaiting him with a lantern, and together the two boys knelt in the straw, their shoulders touching, while John held the weakling of the family in his strong but gentle hands.
    “Poor pup!” he said. “We’ll never make anything of him, with this squashed foot of his.”
    “Better drown him, Master John,” suggested Tim.
    “No, Tim, we won’t do that. He’s healthy enough, it’s only that he’ll not be winning any prizes for me, but that’s no reason why I should take his life. All right, Nellie, I wouldn’t hurt your babies.”
    John always forgot his problems when he was with his dogs. Their devotion and their dependence brought out the best in him, and he would willingly have passed half the night in the stable but for the fact that Tim must have his supper and go to bed.
    “Is it true, Master John, what they’re saying in Doonhaven?” asked the lad, as he bolted the stable-door and put the empty pail down by the pump.
    “What are they saying now, Tim?”
    “Why, that Mr. Brodrick is going to blast away the whole of Hungry Hill with dynamite that’s coming over in a ship from Bronsea, and we are all going to be turned out of our homes to make room for the Cornish miners he’ll be bringing.”
    “No, Tim, that’s a fairy-tale, and you’re a rogue to repeat it. My father is going to sink a mine in Hungry Hill, true enough, he and Mr.
    Lumley, but you won’t have to move for the miners. The work will give employment in Doonhaven, and bring money to the people who are out of work and have no land.”
    The lad looked at him doubtfully, and shook his head.
    “They say in Doonhaven it doesn’t do to interfere with Nature,” he said. “If the Saints wished for the copper to be used, why then it would be running down the side of the hill in a stream, where we could find it.”
    “Who told you that, Tim? Was it Morty Donovan?”
    “That is what they say in Doonhaven,” said the boy, refusing to be drawn, and he wished his young master