Nothing annoyed me more as a boy than for my cap to be knocked off.
Shock knew that, and it had been one of his favourite tricks, so that I
knew, as I thought, whence this piece of annoyance had come, and,
picking up the small hard cabbage that had been thrown, I determined to
avenge myself by sending it back with a good aim.
True enough there was Master Shock, lying flat on his chest with his
chin resting in his hands, and his feet kicking up behind, now going up
and down, now patting together, for he had taken off his boots.
Shock was having a good stare over the market from his elevated position
on the top of the baskets; and, taking a good aim as I thought, I threw
the little hard stale cabbage, and then dodged round the side of the
cart. I stood aghast directly after, beside a pile of baskets, and
watch a quarrel that had just begun a dozen yards away, where a big
red-faced man was holding a very fluffy white hat in his hand and
brushing it with his arm, and bandying angry words with a rough-looking
young market porter, who, with a great flat basket under one arm and his
other through a knot, was speaking menacingly-"Don't you hit me again."
"Yes, I will, and knock your ugly head off if you do that again," said
the man with the white hat.
"Do what again?"
"Do what again!--why, throw rotten cabbages at my hat."
"I didn't."
"Yes, you did."
"No, I didn't."
"Why, half-a-dozen here saw you do it. You've got hold of the wrong
man, my lad, for larks; so now, then!"
I saw him stick on his white hat all on one side, and he looked very
fierce and severe; while I felt covered with shame and confusion, for I
knew that it was my cabbage that had done the mischief.
Whop!
That was another right in my ear, and I turned angrily upon Shock,
forgetting all about the man with the white hat and the half-conceived
idea of going up to him and telling the truth. But there was Shock
staring about him from a dozen feet above my head, and singing softly,
"I've been to Paris and I've been to Dover;" and the cabbage had struck
me on the other side, so that unless Shock had learned how to project
decayed cabbage after the fashion of boomerangs it could not have been
he.
There was a group of bare-legged boys, though, away to my left--a set of
ragged objects who might have passed for Shock's brothers and cousins,
only that they were thin and unwholesomely pale, and extremely dirty,
while although Shock was often quite as dirty, his seemed to be the
wholesome dirt of country earth, and he looked brown, and healthy, and
strong.