Little bright eyes looked down and saw the strangers; but they had seen them before, and no harm ever resulted—only lovely feasts of nuts laid out on the tops of walls—so they just ran on down their own highway, seeming as light as feathers, and leaping and springing with indescribable grace.
At last they got to the high wall that divides the lower orchard from the birch and hazel coppice, and they played along that wall, bright spots of reddy-brown against the dark green of the ivy and the purple tone of the swelling birch buds. All seemed gaiety and happiness, till a third little bushy tail popped up over the wall from the coppice—and then there were fireworks indeed! I expect they were relations who were not on cordial terms! We left them having a whole-hearted hand-to-hand fight—which, I must say, seems a much more satisfactory way of settling a difference than either Zepp or submarine methods.
Indoors the table had been laid for tea, preparatory to our arrival, by Mrs. Widow, who, as already mentioned, is the custodian of the house in my absence. She gives an old-world curtsy that is very disarming, and says, “I’m main glad to see you back again, miss, and I hope you’ll find everything to your liking.”
That, however, is as it may be.
Nevertheless, there is something about the way that table is always laid that rejoices my heart, even though I might not wish to have my meals set in that pattern every day. The large white cloth may not present the glass-like surface of the town-laundered tablecloth, but at least it is white, and—like the cottage sheets and towels and pillow-cases—it holds the scents of the hillside garden where it was hung out to dry; and though the creases are somewhat ridgy and insistent, and the cloth has been ironed a trifle askew, I know several people who would rather have tea off this tablecloth than the most elaborate dinner and the finest napery that London hotels can produce.
Knives and forks are placed with great precision around the table at intervals, a cup and saucer and plate beside each, the crockery never by any chance matching! In the mathematical centre a loaf of farmhouse bread stands on a kitchen plate, flanked on one side—to the East, as it were—by a large white jug holding a quart of milk, and to the West, by the sugar basin. The big brown teapot stands at the South Pole; and a pudding-basin of new-laid eggs, laid by the widow’s own fowls, are waiting, at the North Pole, to be cooked. A small plate bearing a dinner knife and half a pound of butter (which is never put into the proper butter dish) is placed at the South-West; this is balanced at the South-East by a pot of home-made jam and a tablespoon. Watercress and lettuce may grace the table, though this will be according to the season; but summer or winter, one feature is never omitted, and that is a large kitchen jug full of flowers, gathered by Mrs. Widow from her own garden.
On the day I am writing about, the jug had a brave handful of daffodils, a few sprays of red ribis, dark-brown wallflowers, some small ivy, with some short-stemmed polyanthus suffocating in the centre of the big bunch. And it is wonderful how much you can get crammed into one jug when you try!
Abigail, having none of my weak-minded leanings towards “the primitive,” scornfully whisked the whole lot off the table, as soon as Mrs. Widow had gone back to her own cottage, and re-laid it on modern lines.