: Armenia immolata by Steele Edward Strieby - Armenian question Poetry

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Illustrator: Henry W. Kerr

BETTY GRIER

BY JOSEPH LAING WAUGH

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY Henry W. Kerr, R.S.A.

LONDON: 38 Soho Square, W. W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED EDINBURGH: 339 High Street

Edinburgh: Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.

First printed, Nov. 1915. Reprinted, Dec. 1915.

BETTY GRIER.

When I look round my little bedroom and note the various familiar items that make up its furnishings, when my eye lights on much that I associate with the days o' Auld Langsyne, I am conscious of a feeling of homeliness, a sense of chumship with my surroundings, and I can scarcely realise that fourteen years have come and gone since last I laid my head on the pillow of this small truckle-bed.

So far as I can recall the arrangement of its old-fashioned, ordinary-looking plenishings, everything remains exactly as I left it. My trout and salmon rods, all tied together--each cased in its own particular-coloured canvas--stand there in the corner beside an old out-of-date gaff and a capacious landing-net which that king of fishers, Clogger Eskdale, gifted to me when the 'rheumatics' prevented his ever again participating in his favourite sport. My worn leather school-bag, filled with the last batch of books I used, is still suspended from a four-inch nail driven into a 'dook' at the cheek of the mantelpiece. It is a long time ago, but it seems only yesterday since I stood in the middle of this room, unstrapping that bag from my shoulders for the last time. My schooldays were over; with eager, anxious feet I was standing on the threshold of a new life, and to satchel and lesson-book I was bidding farewell.

I well remember Deacon Webster, at my mother's request, inserting that dook and driving home that nail; and he laughed unfeelingly when she explained to him the purpose it was to serve. The deacon could not understand the sentiment which prompted her to assign the bag a place upon the wall; and when, after the nail was secure, he made to hang my 'boy's burden' upon it in much the same callous spirit in which he would screw the last nail in a coffin-lid, my mother stepped forward.

Against the back wall, in the centre, between the door and the corner, stands the old black oak chest of drawers which for sixteen years held the whole outfit of my boyhood's days; while the mahogany looking-glass, with the grooved square standards and the swivel mirror, monopolises still, as it always has done, the whole top shelf thereof.

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