The Pennycomequicks A Novel Author:Sabine Baring-Gould 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: CHAPTER III. A TRUST. DURING dinner that evening the conversation had turned on modern music. Yorkshire folk are, with rare exceptions, musical, and t... more »hose who are not musical are expected, at all events, to be able to take their part in a conversation about music. Someone had spoken about old English ballads, whereupon Captain Lambert had said, as an aside to his uncle: ' No one can doubt what is your favourite song.' ' There you have the advantage of me,' said Jeremiah simply. '" Sally in our Alley "—but I must say you take slow time in getting to the last verse.' Then he hummed the words : ' And when my seven long years are out, Oh, then I'll marry Sally ! And then how happily we'll live, But not in our Alley.' Then it was that the blood had rushed into the manufacturer's temples, a rush of blood occasioned partly by anger at being made the subject of a joke, and partly by the suggestion which startled him. Never before that moment had the thought occurred to him that it was possible for him to bind Salome to him by the closest and surest of ties. No, never before had he imagined that this was possible. How one word starts a train of ideas! As a spark falling on thatch may cause a conflagration, so may a word carelessly dropped set blood on fire and drive a man to madness. That little remark had produced in Jeremiah an effect greater than Lambert could have calculated, and his mother went very near the truth when she rebuked him for saying what he had. From thenceforth Jeremiah could no longer look at Salome in the old light; she was no more a child to him, and he no more an old man beyond the reach of that flame that sweeps round the world and scorches all men. In Wagner's great opera of the ' Valkyrie/ Brunnhild is represented asleep, engi...« less