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Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor, and Other Sketches, by the Author of 'hogan, M.p.'.
Flitters Tatters and the Counsellor and Other Sketches by the Author of 'hogan Mp' Author:Mary Hartley General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1881 Original Publisher: Macmillan Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: FLITTEES, TATTEES, AND THE COUNSELLOR Ladies first. Flitters, aged eleven, sucking the tail of a red herring, as a member of the weaker and gentler sex first demands our attention. She is older and doubly stronger than either Tatters or the Counsellor, who are seated beside her on the wall of the river, sharing with her the occupation of watching the operations of a mud-barge at work some dozen yards out in the water. Of the genus street arab Flitters is a fair type. Barefooted, of course, though were it not for the pink lining that shows now and again between her toes one might doubt that fact -- bareheaded, too, with a tangled, tufted, matted shock of hair that has never known other comb save that ten-toothed one provided by Nature, and which indeed Flitters uses with a frequency of terrible suggestiveness. B The face consists mainly of eyes and mouth; this last-named feature is enormously wide, so wide that there seemed some foundation for a remark of the Counsellor's made in the days of their early acquaintance, before time and friendship had softened down to his unaccustomed eyes the asperities of Flitters' appearance, and which remark was to the effect that only for her ears her mouth would have gone round her head. The Counsellor was not so named without cause, for his tongue stopped at nothing. This mouth was furnished with a set of white, even teeth, which glistened when Flitters vouchsafed a smile, and gleamed like tusks when she was enraged, which she was often, for Flitters hada short temper and a very independent disposition. The eyes, close set, under...« less