Left to Themselves

Mr. Patrick Sip had seated himself by the side of the brook that purled through the deep green ravine lying about three miles back of the Ossokosee House. Mr. Sip was not a guest at that new and flourishing summer resort. Mr. Sip, indeed, had hardly found himself a welcome guest anywhere within five or six years. He possessed a big, burly figure, a very unshaven and sunburnt face, and a suit of clothes once black, when upon the back of an earlier wearer, but long since faded to a dirty brown. Mr. Sip never used an umbrella nowadays, although he exercised much in the open air. Upon his unkempt hair slanted a tattered straw hat. Beside him lay a thickish walking-stick without any varnish. There was one thing which Mr. Sip had not about him, as any body would have inferred at a glance, although it is often difficult to detect by sight-a good character. In short, Mr. Sip looked the complete example of just what he was-a sturdy, veteran tramp of some thirty summers and winters, who had not found through honest labor a roof over his head or a morsel between his bristly lips since his last release from some one of the dozen work-houses that his presence had graced.

"Humph!" said Mr. Sip, half aloud, as he changed his position so as to let his bare feet sink deeper in the rippling creek (Mr. Sip was laving them), "I see plenty o' water around here, but there aint nothin' in sight looks like bread. Plague them turnips! Raw turnips aint no sort o' a breakfast for a gentleman's stomach. Is they, now?"

He splashed his feet about in the pure cold water, by no means to cleanse them from the dust of the highway, but simply because it was easier to drop them into the stream than to hold them out as he sat on the abrupt bank. He whistled a part of a tune and seemed to forget having put his question to the wrens and wagtails in the sassafras.

- Taken from "Left to Themselves" written by Edward Prime-Stevenson