Roast fowl with ham—1 plateful.
Currant cake with cheese—1 slice.
Blancmange—1 plateful.
Jelly: yellow—1 plateful.
Jelly: pink—1 plateful.
Mince-pie with cheese—One.
Muffins, hard-cakes, brown bread, white bread-company manners fix no limit to these details.
Tea—Two cups; three if you’ve cheek to ask for them.
Now I think you’ll agree that was a square meal for one man; but you must remember Jim was six feet four in his stockings, and six feet four requires a lot of support. It is a mercy all had not the stature and the appetites of Jim and myself, else Ruth and Miriam would not have been busy, as they were for many a day after, making up little parcels of the fragments that remained, carrying them to those of our neighbours who most needed such help, that they too might rejoice in Miriam’s good fortune.
We had got to the final stage of the repast—the last cup of tea, the one in which the elders gravely stirred half a wineglass of Jamaica rum, and to which even Ruth and Miriam, faintly protesting, were induced to add a tiny spoonful just to flavour it, when Mary startled us all by saying: