“No one ever manages to get them chopped so beautifully fine as she does,” said Miss Bretherton when recommending them to my notice. “I advise you to try them.”
Still, whatever obligation there may have been was offset, surely, by the piece of pork. The griskin is the lean portion of some part of the quadruped’s anatomy after the fat has been cut off for curing. This joint—which we never see in London—is always popular with us in the country; so popular, that I had ordered a piece only the day before from the butcher. It was just the season when people were killing their pigs, and the butcher had suggested griskin. Still, it was easy to put the extra piece in salt, and the flavour would only be improved thereby; my one regret was that the butcher had sent a very large joint, when I had particularly mentioned that I only wanted a little piece.
I had originally intended to devote the day to gardening, not to house-cleaning.
“Of course you keep a permanent gardener?” people inquire of me. “I see; a general handy man; it comes to the same thing; he will save you all trouble.”
Those of my acquaintances who have never had a place out of town to look after, always conclude that country districts fairly bristle with capable, willing men, and poor-but-honest, hard-working women, all of them anxious to do my work—and at a merely nominal wage too; whereas one has the utmost trouble to get either man or woman to do a day’s work at any price. I pay the handy man the same wage per day as I pay my thoroughly experienced London gardener; and he can only manage to spare me a small amount of his time at that price.
He knows very little about flowers, but he weeds in an enlightened manner, and he understands the elementary principles underlying vegetable growing on a small scale. For the most part the villagers bother very little about their gardens, only cultivating just sufficient ground for their immediate needs.
The unenlightened local method of dealing with weeds is this. He-who-is-paid-to-garden leaves them to grow to a fair height—especially if no one is likely to be there for some weeks to see them. Then, when they have absorbed a generous amount of nourishment from the ground, and generally suffocated everything small within their reach, he merely turns the soil over, with the weeds on the underneath side, draws a rake over the surface, and presto! you have a nice tidy bed.
This method is known as “digging in.”
Of course, in twenty-four hours the good-natured things start to poke cheerful noses through the soil again. But that doesn’t matter. Life is long, and the gardener is paid to clear them away again.