'
'You are speaking quite softly. You are not tired, father?'
'Tired!' echoed Caleb, with a great burst of animation, 'what
should tire me, Bertha? _I_ was never tired. What does it mean?'
To give the greater force to his words, he checked himself in an
involuntary imitation of two half-length stretching and yawning
figures on the mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal
state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of
a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling
Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice,
that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more thoughtful
than ever.
'What! You're singing, are you?' said Tackleton, putting his head
in at the door. 'Go it! _I_ can't sing.'
Nobody would have suspected him of it. He hadn't what is generally
termed a singing face, by any means.
'I can't afford to sing,' said Tackleton. 'I'm glad YOU CAN. I
hope you can afford to work too. Hardly time for both, I should
think?'
'If you could only see him, Bertha, how he's winking at me!'
whispered Caleb.
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