about very busily employed.

"What is your name?" Mary inquired.

He stood up to answer her.

"Ben Weatherstaff," he answered, and then he added with a
surly chuckle, "I'm lonely mysel' except when he's with me,"
and he jerked his thumb toward the robin. "He's th'
only friend I've got."

"I have no friends at all," said Mary. "I never had.
My Ayah didn't like me and I never played with any one."

It is a Yorkshire habit to say what you think with
blunt frankness, and old Ben Weatherstaff was a Yorkshire
moor man.

"Tha' an' me are a good bit alike," he said.
"We was wove out of th' same cloth. We're neither of us
good lookin' an' we're both of us as sour as we look.
We've got the same nasty tempers, both of us, I'll warrant."

This was plain speaking, and Mary Lennox had never heard
the truth about herself in her life. Native servants
always salaamed and submitted to you, whatever you did.
She had never thought much about her looks, but she wondered
if she was as unattractive as Ben Weatherstaff and she
also wondered if she looked as sour as he had looked
before the robin came. She actually began to wonder