In vain I put in "When was it--in what year was it that
you heard that Mr Peter was the Great Lama?" They only joined
issue to dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in
which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs Forrester
(after they had grown warm and cool again) acknowledged that she
always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she
did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologised for it
very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made
of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.
The only fact I gained from this conversation was that certainly
Peter had last been heard of in India, "or that neighbourhood"; and
that this scanty intelligence of his whereabouts had reached
Cranford in the year when Miss Pole had brought her Indian muslin
gown, long since worn out (we washed it and mended it, and traced
its decline and fall into a window-blind before we could go on);
and in a year when Wombwell came to Cranford, because Miss Matty
had wanted to see an elephant in order that she might the better
imagine Peter riding on one; and had seen a boa-constrictor too,
which was more than she wished to imagine in her fancy-pictures of
Peter's locality; and in a year when Miss Jenkyns had learnt some
piece of poetry off by heart, and used to say, at all the Cranford
parties, how Peter was "surveying mankind from China to Peru,"
which everybody had thought very grand, and rather appropriate,
because India was between China and Peru, if you took care to turn
the globe to the left instead of the right.
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