Explore "Memoirs of a Midget" by Walter de la Mare on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs. Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr. Bates held my landlady in almost speechless respect. "A woman in a thousand," he repeatedly assured me, when we were grown a little accustomed to one another; "a woman in ten thousand. And if things hadn't been what they was, you may understand, they might have turned out different. Ah, miss, there's one looking down on us could tell a tale. " I looked up past his oblong head at the ceiling, but only a few flies were angling round the chandelier.
Mrs. Bowater's compliments were less indirect. "That Bates," she would say, surveying his day's handiwork after he was gone, "is all thumbs."