“Well, for my part,” said the crone, “meat’s my grievance: all the best bits go to the butties, and the pieces with bone in are chopped off for the colliers’ wives.”
“Dame, when will the door open?” asked a very little palefaced boy. “I have been here all this morn, and never broke my fast.”
“And what do you want, chilt?”
“I want a loaf for mother; but I don’t feel I shall ever get home again, I’m all in a way so dizzy.”
“Liza Gray,” said a woman with black beady eyes and a red nose, speaking in a sharp voice and rushing up to a pretty slatternly woman in a straw bonnet with a dirty fine ribbon, and a babe at her breast; “you know the person I’m looking for.”
“Well, Mrs Mullins, and how do you do?” she replied, “in a sweet sawney tone.”
“How do you do, indeed! How are people to do in these bad times?”
“They is indeed hard Mrs Mullins. If you could see my tommy book! How I wish I knew figures! Made up as of last Thursday night by that little divil, Master Joe Diggs. He has stuck it in here and stuck it in there, till it makes one all of a-maze. I’m sure I never had the things; and my man is out of all patience, and says I can no more keep house than a natural born.”
“My man is a-wanting to see your man,” said Mrs Mullins, with a flashing eye; “and you know what about.”
“And very natural, too,” said Liza Gray; “but how are we to pay the money we owe him, with such a tommy-book as this, good neighbour Mullins?”