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As so often with Ballantyne there are two concurrent stories in this book. In one of these we meet two little stray and homeless boys in the vicinity of Whitechapel in the East-End of London. These two are rescued from the streets, trained up and sent to Canada to live as part of a farmer's family there.
The other story concerns the mother of one of the boys, with too many children, a drink-habit, and a wife-beating and criminal husband: plainly there's not much going for her, but her eldest daughter manages to bring life together for the family. The bad father, on his release from jail, deserts his wife, which is no bad thing; the wife takes the Blue Ribbon and gives up drinking; a couple of well-to-do gentlemen take an interest in the family; and finally they all emigrate to Canada and live happily ever after.
Of course, it is a little more complicated than that, with a burglary thrown in as well as a smattering of do-good-ers and do-bad-ers. But for those with an interest in the street-life of the nineteenth century this will be a very interesting book for you.
A Note about the Author.
Robert Michael Ballantyne was born in 1825 and died in 1894. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, and in 1841 he became a clerk with the Hudson Bay Company, working at the Red River Settlement in Northern Canada until 1847, arriving back in Edinburgh in 1848. The letters he had written home were very amusing in their description of backwoods life, and his family publishing connections suggested that he should construct a book based on these letters. Three of his most enduring books were written over the next decade, "The Young Fur Traders", "Ungava", "The Hudson Bay Company", and were based on his experiences with the H.B.C. In this period he also wrote "The Coral island" and "Martin Rattler", both of these taking place in places never visited by Ballantyne. Having been chided for small mistakes he made in these books, he resolved always to visit the places he wrote about. With these books he became known as a great master of literature intended for teenagers. He researched the Cornish Mines, the London Fire Brigade, the Postal Service, the Railways, the laying down of submarine telegraph cables, the construction of light-houses, the light-ship service, the life-boat service, South Africa, Norway, the North Sea fishing fleet, ballooning, deep-sea diving, Algiers, and many more, experiencing the lives of the men and women in these settings by living with them for weeks and months at a time, and he lived as they lived.
He was a very true-to-life author, depicting the often squalid scenes he encountered with great care and attention to detail. His young readers looked forward eagerly to his next books, and through the 1860s and 1870s there was a flow of books from his pen, sometimes four in a year, all very good reading. The rate of production diminished in the last ten or fifteen years of his life, but the quality never failed.
He published over ninety books under his own name, and a few books for very young children under the pseudonym "Comus".
For today's taste his books are perhaps a little too religious, and what we would nowadays call "pi". In part that was the way people wrote in those days, but more important was the fact that in his days at the Red River Settlement, in the wilds of Canada, he had been a little dissolute, and he did not want his young readers to be unmindful of how they ought to behave, as he felt he had been.
Some of his books were quite short, little over 100 pages. These books formed a series intended for the children of poorer parents, having less pocket-money. These books are particularly well-written and researched, because he wanted that readership to get the very best possible for their money. They were published as six series, three books in each series.
Re-created as an e-Text by Nick Hodson, September 2003.
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DUSTY DIAMONDS CUT AND POLISHED, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.
Every one has heard of those ponies--those shaggy, chubby, innocent-looking little creatures--for which the world is indebted, we suppose, to Shetland.
Well, once on a time, one of the most innocent-looking, chubbiest, and shaggiest of Shetland ponies--a dark brown one--stood at the door of a mansion in the west-end of London.
It was attached to a wickerwork vehicle which resembled a large clothes-basket on small wheels. We do not mean, of course, that the pony was affectionately attached to it. No; the attachment was involuntary and unavoidable, by reason of a brand-new yellow leather harness with brass buckles. It objected to the attachment, obviously, for it sidled this way, and straddled that way, and whisked its enormous little tail, and tossed its rotund little head, and stamped its ridiculously small feet; and champed its miniature bit, as if it had been a war-horse of the largest size, fit to carry a Wallace, a Bruce, or a Richard of the Lion-heart, into the midst of raging battle.
And no wonder; for many months had not elapsed since that brown creature had kicked up its little heels, and twirled its tail, and shaken its shaggy mane in all the wild exuberance of early youth and unfettered freedom on the heather hills of its native island.
In the four-wheeled basket sat a little girl whom it is useless to describe as beautiful. She was far beyond that! Her delicate colour, her little straight nose, her sparkling teeth, her rosebud of a mouth, her enormous blue eyes, and floods of yellow hair--pooh! these are not worth mentioning in the same sentence with her expression. It was that which carried all before it, and swept up the adoration of man-and-woman-kind as with the besom of fascination.
She was the only child of Sir Richard Brandon. Sir Richard was a knight and a widower. He was knighted, not because of personal merit, but because he had been mayor of some place, sometime or other, when some one connected with royalty had something important to do with it! Little Diana was all that this knight and widower had on earth to care for, except, of course, his horses and dogs, and guns, and club, and food. He was very particular as to his food. Not that he was an epicure, or a gourmand, or luxurious, or a hard drinker, or anything of that sort--by no means. He could rough it, (so he said), as well as any man, and put up with whatever chanced to be going, but, when there was no occasion for roughing it, he did like to see things well cooked and nicely served; and wine, you know, was not worth drinking--positively nauseous--if it was not of the best.
Sir Richard was a poor man--a very poor man. He had only five thousand a year--a mere pittance; and he managed this sum in such a peculiar way that he never had anything wherewith to help a struggling friend, or to give to the poor, or to assist the various religious and charitable institutions by which he was surrounded; while at certain intervals in the year he experienced exasperating difficulty in meeting the demands of those torments to society, the tradespeople--people who ought to be ashamed of themselves for not being willing to supply the nobility and gentry with food and clothing gratuitously! Moreover, Sir Richard never by any chance laid anything by.
Standing by the pony's head, and making tender efforts to restrain his waywardness, stood a boy--a street boy--a city Arab. To a Londoner any description of this boy would be superfluous, but it may be well to state, for the benefit of the world at large, that the class to which he belonged embodies within its pale the quintessence of rollicking mischief, and the sublimate of consummate insolence.
This remarkable boy was afflicted with a species of dance--not that of Saint Vitus, but a sort of double-shuffle, with a stamp of the right foot at the end--in which he was prone to indulge, consciously and unconsciously, at all times, and the tendency to which he sometimes found it difficult to resist. He was beginning to hum the sharply-defined air to which he was in the habit of performing this dance, when little Diana said, in a silvery voice quite in keeping with her beauty--
"Let go his head, boy; I'm quite sure that he cannot bear restraint."
It may be remarked here that little Di was probably a good judge on that point, being herself nearly incapable of bearing restraint.
"I'd better not, miss," replied the boy with profound respect in tone and manner, for he had yet to be paid for the job; "he seems raither frisky, an' might take a fancy to bolt, you know."
"Let his head go, I say!" returned Miss Diana with a flashing of the blue eyes, and a pursing of the rosebud mouth that proved her to be one of Adam's race after all.
"Vell, now, don't you think," rejoined the boy, in an expostulating tone, "that it would be as veil to vait for the guv'nor before givin' 'im 'is 'ead?"
"Do as I bid you, sir!" said Di, drawing herself up like an empress.
Still the street boy held the pony's head, and it is probable that he would have come off the victor in this controversy, had not Diana's dignified action given to the reins which she held a jerk. The brown pony, deeming this full permission to go on, went off with a bound that overturned the boy, and caused the fore-wheel to strike him on the leg as it passed.
Springing up with the intention of giving chase to the runaway, the little fellow again fell, with a sharp cry of pain, for his leg was broken.
At the same moment Sir Richard Brandon issued from the door of his mansion leisurely, and with an air of calm serenity, pulling on his gloves. It was one of the knight's maxims that, under all circumstances, a gentleman should maintain an appearance of imperturbable serenity. When, however, he suddenly beheld the street boy falling, and his daughter standing up in her wickerwork chariot, holding on to the brown pony like an Amazon warrior of ancient times, his maxim somehow evaporated. His serenity vanished. So did his hat as he bounded from beneath it, and left it far behind in his mad and hopeless career after the runaway.
A policeman, coming up just as Sir Richard disappeared, went to the assistance of the street boy.
"Not much hurt, youngster," he said kindly, as he observed that the boy was very pale, and seemed to be struggling hard to repress his feelings.
"Vell, p'raps I is an' p'raps I ain't, Bobby," replied the boy with an unsuccessful attempt at a smile, for he felt safe to chaff or insult his foe in the circumstances, "but vether hurt or not it vont much matter to you, vill it?"
He fainted as he spoke, and the look of half-humorous impudence, as well as that of pain, gave place to an expression of infantine repose.
The policeman was so struck by the unusual sight of a street boy looking innocent and unconscious, that he stooped and raised him quite tenderly in his arms.
"You'd better carry him in here," said Sir Richard Brandon's butler, who had come out. "I saw it 'appen, and suspect he must be a good deal damaged."
