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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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752 and is not intended to frighten anybody. Let us give everybody their due, Kate; I am bound to say that.’ So saying, Mrs Nickleby nodded her head, and patted the back of her daughter’s hand, a great many times, and looked as if she could tell something vastly important if she chose, but had self- denial, thank Heaven; and wouldn’t do it. ‘What do you mean, mama?’ demanded Kate, in evident surprise. ‘Don’t be flurried, my dear,’ replied Mrs Nickleby, looking towards the garden-wall, ‘for you see I’m not, and if it would be excusable in anybody to be flurried, it certainly would--under all the circumstances--be excusable in me, but I am not, Kate--not at all.’ ‘It seems designed to attract our attention, mama,’ said Kate. ‘It is designed to attract our attention, my dear; at least,’ rejoined Mrs Nickleby, drawing herself up, and patting her daughter’s hand more blandly than before, ‘to attract the attention of one of us. Hem! you needn’t be at all uneasy, my dear.’ Kate looked very much perplexed, and was apparently about to ask for further explanation, when a shouting and scuffling noise, as of an elderly gentleman whooping, and kicking up his legs on loose gravel, with great violence, was heard to proceed from the same direction as the former sounds; and before they had subsided, a large cucumber was seen to shoot up in the air with the velocity of a sky-rocket, whence it descended, tumbling over and over, until it fell at Mrs Nickleby’s feet. This remarkable appearance was succeeded by another of a precisely similar description; then a fine vegetable marrow, of unusually large dimensions, was seen to whirl aloft, and come |
