Sandy by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
page 12 of 202 (05%)
page 12 of 202 (05%)
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the delinquent, and he did penance by foregoing the joys of society.
Menial labor and the knowledge that he would not be allowed to land, but would be sent back by the first steamer, were made all the more unbearable by his first experience with illness. He had accepted his fate and prepared to die when the ship's surgeon found him. The ship's surgeon was cruel enough to laugh, but he persuaded Sandy to come back to life. He was a small, white, round little man; and when he came rolling down the deck in his white linen suit, his face beaming from its white frame of close-cropped hair and beard, he was not unlike one of his own round white little pills, except that their sweetness stopped on the outside and his went clear through. He discovered Sandy lying on his face in the passageway, his right hand still dutifully wielding the scrub-brush, but his spirit broken and his courage low. "Hello!" he exclaimed briskly; "what's your name?" "Sandy Kilday." "Scotch, eh?" "Me name is. The rest of me's Irish," groaned Sandy. "Well, Sandy, my boy, that's no way to scrub. Come out and get some air, and then go back and do it right." He guided Sandy's dying footsteps to the deck and propped him against the railing. That was when he laughed. |
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