THE OLD WHETSTONE.
The widow, however, expected the return of her rash son on the anniversary of his departure, and put aside a “hot cross bun” for him. Good Friday passed, and no familiar footstep came to the threshold, and the days, weeks, and months succeeded one another until at last Easter came round again. Hoping fondly against hope, the widow put aside another bun for the wanderer: in vain. Year by year she maintained the custom; but the son lay drowned somewhere “full fathom deep,” and the mother never again saw him on earth.
In the fulness of time she died, and strangers came and were told the story of that accumulated store of stale buns. And then the cottage was demolished and the present house built, taking its name from this tale. And ever since, with every recurrent Easter, a bun is added to the great store that is by this time accumulated in the wire-netting hanging from the ceiling of the otherwise commonplace bar. Then the story is told anew; not with much apparent interest nor belief in the good faith of it; but sentiment lurks in the heart, even though it refuse to be spoken, and the flippant stranger is apt to find himself unexpectedly discouraged.
On Good Friday, 1906, the sixty-eighth annual bun, stamped with the date, was duly added to the dried, smoke-begrimed and blackened collection.
HOT CROSS BUNS AT THE “WIDOW’S SON.”
We must perhaps include among inns with relics those modern public-houses whose owners, as a bid for custom, have established museums of more or less importance on their premises. Among these the “Edinburgh Castle,” in Mornington Road, Regent’s Park, is prominent, and boasts no fewer than three eggs of the Great Auk, whose aggregate cost at auction was 620 guineas. They were, of course, all purchased at different times, for Great Auk’s eggs do not come into the country, like the “new-laid” products of the domestic fowls, by the gross. The Great Auk, in fact, is extinct, and the eggs are exceedingly rare, as may be judged by the price they command. “Great,” of course, is a relative term, and in this case a considerable deal of misapprehension as to the size of the eggs originally existed in the minds of many customers of the “Edinburgh Castle.” In especial, the newspaper reports of how Mr. T. G. Middlebrook, the proprietor, had given 200 guineas for the third egg in his collection, excited the interest of a cabman, who drove all the way from Charing Cross to see the marvel. When he was shown, reposing in a plush-lined case, an egg not much larger than that of a goose, his indignation was pathetic.
“Where is it?” he asked....
“Wot? Thet? ’Corl thet a Great Hork’s Hegg? W’y, from wot they tole me, I thort it was abaht the size of me bloomin’ keb!”
But they have no roc’s eggs, imported from the pages of the Arabian Nights, at the “Edinburgh Castle.”