Our friend turned a stork’s eye into the pot, and then, with a word of kind commendation to the cook—“A man’s word of encouragement is everything to a woman, my lad, with a wink to me—he called for a pint of port wine and placed it handy.
“Now,” said he to the woman, “strain off that soup in a quarter of an hour, add that wine, and we’ll show these gentlemen that between us we can cook.”
In a quarter of an hour we were sitting round the table. Our friend tried to look modest and devoid of all self-consciousness as the woman entered with a glow of crimson triumph on her face, and bearing in her hands an immense dish with the well-known battered zinc cover concealing the contents.
Down went the dish, and up went the cover, disclosing a rugged, mountainous heap of the bones of hare, with threads of flesh still adhering to them, and the skeletons of some birds.
“Good Lord!” cried our host. “What’s this anyway? The rags of what was stewed down for the soup?”
Our theorising friend leapt up.
“Woman,” he shouted, “where the devil is the soup?”
“Sure, didn’t ye bid me strain it off, sorr?” said the woman.
“And where the blazes did you strain it off?” he asked, in an awful whisper.
“Why, where should I be after straining it, sorr, but into the bog?” she replied.