“There y’are, nice bit o’ fish that. I couldn’t get no haddicks ’cept fillets, and that little lot cost me fourteen pence with a kipper for meself.”
Turning to me he continued—
“I can’t stand haddick, yer know, but a kipper nicely smoked, with a lot o’ bread and butter, that’s what I like.”
At this juncture the “missis” appeared carrying a large basket which contained,—beside a few oddments of lace and thread, mending wool, shoe laces and reels of cotton,—some loaves of bread and other eatables.
Mention should be made, by the way, of the hawker’s licence, which, carefully stowed away in an envelope, was always left in the basket in case it should be necessary or advisable to demonstrate that her sole means of subsistence was the peddling of lace and other small wares.
There can be no doubt that dukkerin paid best.
The man was about to seat himself preparatory to partaking of the meal, when his wife—noticing the dirty state of his hands—told him in a forcible manner that he should not “sit down to tea with hands like that.”
Looking in my direction, and, assuming a manner evidently intended to appear as an apology for his wife’s outburst, the man observed—
“Ain’t she obsurd now her ole man’s come home.”