Page 176 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

‘Can you swim, Mr. Bates?’ asked Sylvia.
‘Yes, miss, I can.’
‘Well, then, you shall take me; I like you. Mr. Frere can
take mamma. We’ll go and live on a desert island, Mr. Bates,
won’t we, and grow cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit, and—what
nasty hard biscuits!— I’ll be Robinson Crusoe, and you shall
be Man Friday. I’d like to live on a desert island, if I was
sure there were no savages, and plenty to eat and drink.’
‘That would be right enough, my dear, but you don’t find
them sort of islands every day.’
‘Then,’ said Sylvia, with a decided nod, ‘we won’t be ship-
wrecked, will we?’
‘I hope not, my dear.’
‘Put a biscuit in your pocket, Sylvia, in case of accidents,’
suggested Frere, with a grin.
‘Oh! you know my opinion of you, sir. Don’t speak; I
don’t want any argument”.
‘Don’t you?—that’s right.’
‘Mr. Frere,’ said Sylvia, gravely pausing at her mother’s
cabin door, ‘if I were Richard the Third, do you know what
I should do with you?’
‘No,’ says Frere, eating complacently; ‘what would you
do?’
‘Why, I’d make you stand at the door of St. Paul’s Cathe-
dral in a white sheet, with a lighted candle in your hand,
until you gave up your wicked aggravating ways—you
Man!’
The picture of Mr. Frere in a white sheet, with a lighted
candle in his hand, at the door of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was

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