'
'You are speaking quite softly. You are not tired,
father?'
'Tired!' echoed Caleb, with a great burst of anima-
tion, '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 Tackle-
ton, 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 wink-
ing at me!' whispered Caleb.
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