“Well, maybe; as I always say, you can’t be too careful what you eat nowadays. The dinner they’ve got up there smells tasty, don’t it?”
“Duck, is it? I didn’t know they’d had a duck _this_ week. Who did they get it from?”
“Sarah Ann Perkins—that old brown one of hers.”
“The _brown_ one! How much did she ask for it?”
“Four-and-six.” (An audible chuckle.) “Yes, _four-and-six_, if you believe me! Fancy her having the face to ask it for that _brown_ duck! But there, those that can afford to pay may just as well do so for those who can’t.”
“Just as well. But—_four-and-six_! And she won’t finish it up neither; doesn’t care for cold poultry, I’m told; she’ll have a fair slice from the breast, but that’s all; never allows it to be seen in the dining-room a second time. And there’s only the two of them there now. Still, that Abigail’s a hearty eater! My husband was up there a-fixing a tile that had got loosish on the roof, and he told me what she et that day. A gammon rasher and an egg and four slices of bread and butter and a piece of fried bread out of the frying-pan and two cups of coffee—half milk—and some jam for breakfast. He was just a-going up the ladder past the kitchen window at the time; and when he come down, finding as he needed a bit of cement, she was having lunch of bread and cheese and a cup o’ tea out of her lady’s teapot—she always has a cup of tea between ’leven and twelve—and he’d smoked his pipe right out afore she’d finished. And when he come down again at dinner-time she was having a dinner fit for a growed man just come home from the cattle market—made him hungry to see her, it did; he hung about a bit looking for his jack-knife, as he wanted something to measure with. And at tea-time he went in for a drop o’ water to mix the cement, and she was having potted meat and toast—butter, too, not dripping toast, if you ever did. But, of course, she relishes the good vittles she gets in a country place like ourn. So different to the stuff you get in a town.”
“You’re right there; but they do have a sight o’ things down from London. There was a box with ‘Army and Navy Stores’ writ on it that was so heavy, it was all old Bob could do to get it on his shoulder, with our Tom to give him a hand. Old Bob said he’d been reading in the papers what awful waste there is in some o’ the army camps and how the food gets throw’d away or sold by the cartload, to get rid of it, but he didn’t know it was going on in the navy too—wicked, I call it. They thought it must be tinned things, it were such a weight, but they couldn’t make out for sure, though they rattled it ever so hard to see; it was packed up awful tight.”