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Bredimaster Directory 05
Page 10
We walked and walked the entire day, until 6 p.m., covering a distance of 26 kil. The Indian Miguel worried me the whole day, saying that cutting the _picada_ was heavy work and he could not go on, as his finger was hurting him, and the pay he received--L1 sterling a day--was too small for the work he had to do. I had to keep constant watch on him, as he was a man of a slippery nature, and I did not know what he might do from one moment to another. Also he said we were simply committing suicide by trying to go through the virgin forest, as we should meet thousands of Indians who would attack us, and we had no chance of escape. I needed this man and his companion to carry my sextant and the unexposed photographic plates, some two hundred of them, which were of considerable weight.
This good lady, whose name by the way was Bromfield, had a fine high temper of her own, or thought it politic to affect one. One night when the boys were particularly noisy she burst like a hurricane into the hall, collared a youngster, and told him he was "the rampingest-scampingest-rackety-tackety-tow-row-roaringest boy in the whole school." Would Mrs. Newton have been able to set the aunt and the dog before us so vividly if she had been more highly educated? Would Mrs. Bromfield have been able to forge and hurl her thunderbolt of a word if she had been taught how to do so, or indeed been at much pains to create it at all? It came. It was her [Greek text]. She did not probably know that she had done what the greatest scholar would have had to rack his brains over for many an hour before he could even approach. Tradition says that having brought down her boy she looked round the hall in triumph, and then after a moment's lull said, "Young gentlemen, prayers are excused," and left them.
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