Murray's magazine - 1887 Author:Unknown Author 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: H Bargee's Sweetbeart. The three forty-five horse-car, or tram as they call it there, had just gone jingling down the white road to Swinton, which ran at the ... more »bottom of the field lying in front of the Pendlebury Children's Hospital. A well-knit young fellow was walking up one of the little gravel paths that lead from the sweep of the carriage drive, between the square grass plots, to the " Patients' Visitors' door," in the side of the long central corridor, one blazing September afternoon. His moleskin trousers, and corduroy waiscoat made with sleeves, and faced with dark brown velveteen open below the top button, over a blue guernsey, made one at once feel sure that neither horses nor boats were totally unfamiliar to him. And lastly, the sealskin cap which he took off, and twirled in his great hands as he reached the door, would let any one who has ever walked on the towing-path of a canal, into the secret of his apparently double occupation. John Thruppwasa bargee ; and a fine strapping young fellow : an easy six feet in his blue-worsted socks; deep in the chest and with not an ounce of superfluous fat anywhere. If his brow was low, with the hair that fell over it coarse and tan-coloured, it was broad and " stood upright," and the eyes under it were good, honest blue ones. The clean-shaved lips met firmly over two rows of strong white teeth, in a jaw heavy but not brutal. No one could call John Thrupp a lout, if he was a bargee ; and though he stooped a little from the shoulders, it wasn't the outcome of a slouchy nature in the man, but simply because he could, and did if necessary, drag, by a rope over his shoulder, a heavy lumbering barge that would puzzle many an upright Guardsman to stir. So far from being a lout, John Thrupp had two, at least, of the indispensable a...« less