All About Gels.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XIII, 28 September 1901, Page 618

All About Gels.

Mothers is mothers. I’m talking about gels. What I say is as a man, lie he ever so daft, never acts the goat entirely until he finds a gel to lead him. A man in liquor’s a ninny and a nuisance, but there’s nothin’ so despisable as a man in love. Now. me I’ncle Tom was gettin’ to years o’ discretion afore ’e disgraced hisself, but once he started the looney business he loonied it in such a way as every calf on his father's farm was made to blush for ’im. As for the family, they was fit to run the country with upright and downstraight shame. And all the cold sense they gave him was wasted: he was so full o’ foolishness that he’d nowhere to put it, and argufyin’ with him was like tryin’ to blow out a fire with a pair of bellows. There was a slip of a gel Uncle Tom went to school with. They w?re comrades in a kid’s way, and used to rob orchards, make mud-pies, play tip-cat, and fight with each other, until Tom went to boardin’ school and got too much sense to play with gels. Then the gel growed, as gels do grow, in their silly fashion, till she was all legs an’ wings, an’ elbers an’ knees, with a big plait o’ black hair down her back like a horse’s tail o’ May mornin’. You know the kind o’ green wench I mean; one as wore her hat crooked, tried to throw stones like a boy, and giggled every time a dog barked or a whiff o’ blue shadder fell across the sunny road. Mother said she seemed a harmless, heedless hussy, an’ nobody guessed what was in her. But where is there a simpler, sillier-

looking thing than an egg, and yet a crocodile may come out of it as likely as a hen, if ’tis laid that way. Uncle Tom could see no farther than the rest o’ them, and when he came home from school would pass the suckin’ witch with a cool nod, not thinkin’ it fit for his dignity to take more notice of her.

Then the gel went to boardin’ school, stayed there three or four years, an’ come back a woman. She were a real woman, too. All made up o’ loveliness and sin. Even the gels owned she was ’andsome and clever. Mother wasn’t soft on her, you may guess; but mother said she were as' pretty as a bunch of flowers, as proud as a swan, and as selfish as a robin, as will take yer crumbs without a “Thank you,” steal the hair off yer head to line her nest -with, and sing “hey-derry-down” on your tombstone, with never a thought outside her own affairs.

A few days after she got back home Uncle Tom overtook her, coming out of church, and he, not knowin’ her, oped the gate for her in his perlite way. When she got through the gate she turned round and said, “Thank you, Master Tom,” and Tom says “Carrie?” and they stood and looked at. each other across the gate. She looked at him, smilin’, with her big blaek eyes wide open, and one blacx curl flutterin’ against a carnationpink cheek, and he looked at her with the look of a startled deer, his lips parted, and all the blood in his body creepin’ back in shivers to his ’art. His looks tickled her vanity and warmed her wickedness; but hers drew his soul right out at his open lips, as easy as drawing a silk handkerchef through a weddin’ ring.— From “Tales for the Marines.” by Robert Blatchford.