The fellow shook his head.
"No pork and beans!" says I; "do you call this national house-keeping?"
That brought the fellow up to a sense of duty in no time. He snatched up a little thin book that lay on the table, read it a minute, and then went off. By and by he came back with a dish in his hand, on which were a few beans, all brown and crisped to death, with a skimpy slice of pork lying across the top.
I took the dish in my hands, and examined it up and down, right and left, with an air that must have cut that fellow to the soul, if he had one.
"You call that pork and beans?" says I, a-lifting my forefinger, and almost shaking it at him. "Why, young man, it looks more like a handful of gravel-stones."
The young man spread his hands a little, and looked so confused that I began to feel sorry for him.
"Never mind," says I; "no doubt you have had the awful misfortune of being born out of New England, and that is punishment enough. It is the fault of our Congressmen if the great New England mystery of baked beans has not been explained and elucidated in the national kitchen," says I, "most people do degenerate so when they once get out of the pure mountain air. But then our statesmen may consider this a woman's mission. Perhaps it is. There was a time when females understood such things, but we have got to hankering after offices and votes and rostrums, till such things have become nostrums—excuse the rhyme, if you don't happen to be a poetical young man," says I; "it isn't extraordinary that such things are neglected, and that the great New English dish introduced by the Pilgrim Fathers has degenerated into this."
Here I pointed sarcastically at the pebble-stones, and, with killing irony, asked him to send me something to eat.
He took up the dish, and seemed glad to go—no wonder, my words had cut him to the soul. By and by he came back, and handed me that thin book which hadn't half a dozen leaves in it, and, says he:
"Will madam make her choice?"