Friends and acquaintances Author:Richard Rowe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SUPPER IN A CARAVAN. HERE are people who seem to have never done or said a foolish thing in the whole course of their unnatural lives. They are general... more »ly very proud of their exceptional prudence ; but I cannot help thinking that their young days, at any rate, must have been very prosy. An invariably ' sensible ' boy or girl appears to me a dreary little monster. So long as there was no wickedness in them, there are youthful follies on which it is almost pleasant to look back —one's heart was so fresh when they were perpetrated. On account of the queer, good-natured folk to whom it introduced me, I am going to make confession of one of my youthful follies. Behind the Mitre stables, in the old town in which I spent the best part of my boyhood—low, grey flint stables that were once the ruined Abbey's granaries—and the back gardens of a row of sleepy old houses, still called the Precincts, there is a patch of waste land, given up todust-heaps, battered saucepans, smashed pottery, crown- less hats, mildewed odd shoes, and a rank growth of docks and stinging nettles. Per se, it is not an attractive prospect, or rather retrospect; but in the days of my youth it was flooded, for a week or two before Easter, with mystically golden light. The wilderness blossomed like a Lent lily; for it was here that the proprietor of the Yellow Waggon went into spring-quarters in readiness for the coming fair. His booth and properties were packed beneath a tarpaulin on the roof of his caravan, his two horses were put up in the Mitre stables, and for a fortnight he lived in mysterious retreat, with his great dog, his family, and his company. It was to prevent these last from becoming cheap through exposure to unpaid-for glances that he had selected this retirement behind the stables. The le...« less