I had opened the windows in the living-room, and had set Eileen to make the fire, and was seeing to things in the kitchen, when she followed me with an excited squawk: “Oh, ma’am, there’s somebody has lost their canary! It was on the window ledge just now, and it’s flown into a tree. Have you got a bird-cage handy? I expect I could catch it. There it is again”—pointing to a handsome yellow and black tit who was pecking eagerly at some bacon rind I had just hung up outside the window.
I explained.
“Wild, is he? Wild?” she exclaimed; “and don’t they charge you nothing for them?”
She finished the room with one eye perpetually on the windows.
Having a healthy appetite, that had been touched up a little extra with the hill-top air, she was more than willing to help me get the meal ready. I made the usual preliminary inquiries as to her experience in regard to cooking, and was surprised to hear that she had actually won a silver medal at a Cookery Exhibition.
Surely this was unexpected good fortune, and I asked myself if I really deserved such a heaven-sent boon as a silver-medalled cook! I decided, however, that in view of all I had undergone in the past at the hands of those who were not so decorated, it was nothing more than my due that I should be so blessed in my declining years. My only regret was that war-time would allow so little scope for her genius!
Feeling very light-hearted, and wondering how she would get on with Abigail when cook gave one of her periodical notices and I placed Eileen on the permanent staff, I said: “Then I needn’t bother about the breakfast! We will have poached eggs on toast. I’ll lay the cloth while you get them ready.”
But she looked at me doubtfully. “We didn’t ever have poached eggs at the boarding-house,” she began. “But I think I know how to do ’em. You just break them on the gridiron over the top of the fire, don’t you?”
After all, it was I who poached the eggs, while Eileen explained that the medal had been awarded to the cookery class at the orphanage en bloc, for making a Swiss roll. . . . No, unfortunately, she didn’t know how to make Swiss roll either, as she had been down with scarlet fever that term. Still, it was her class that got the medal, so of course she had as much right to it as anyone else.
I trust I bore the disappointment complacently. I’m fairly hardened to such sudden drops in the kitchen thermometer.