" "Won't she stare when she gits 'ere, that's
all!"
"Well, now you'll simply HAVE to build," said Polly, after threatening
to write privately to Miss Amelia, to reassure her. Why not move over
west, and take up a piece of ground in the same road as themselves? But
from this he excused himself, with a laugh and a spit, on the score that
no land-sales had yet been held in their neighbourhood: when he DID turn
out of his present four walls, which had always been plenty good enough
for him, he wanted a place he could "fit up tidy"; which it 'ud stick in
his throat to do so, if he thought it might any day be sold over his
head. Mahony winced at this. Then laughed, with an exaggerated
carelessness. If, in a country like this, you waited for all to be fixed
and sure, you would wait till Domesday. None the less, the thrust
rankled. It was a fact that he himself had not spent a sou on his
premises since they finished building. The thought at the back of HIS
mind, too, was, why waste his hard-earned income on improvements that
might benefit only the next-comer? The yard they sat in, for instance!
Polly had her hens and a ramshackle hen-house; but not a spadeful of
earth had been turned towards the wished-for garden. It was just the
ordinary colonial backyard, fenced round with rude palings which did not
match, and were mended here and there with bits of hoop-iron; its ground
space littered with a medley of articles for which there was no room
elsewhere: boards left lying by the builders, empty kerosene-tins, a
couple of tubs, a ragged cane-chair, some old cases.
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