Every now and then a fit of low spirits used to attack me. It was generally on washing-days, when Mrs Dodley filled the place with steam early in the morning by lighting the copper fire, and then seeming to be making calico puddings to boil and send an unpleasant soapy odour through the house.
Doors and chair backs were so damp and steamy then that I used to be glad to go out and see Shock, whom I often used to find right away in the little shed indulging in a bit of cookery of his own.
If Shock’s hands had been clean I could often have joined him in his feasts, but I never could fancy turnips boiled in a dirty old sauce-pan, nor tender bits of cabbage stump. I made up my mind that I would some day try snails, but when I did join Shock on a soaking wet morning when there was no gardening, and he invited me in his sulky way to dinner, the only times I partook of his fare were on chat days.
What are chat days? Why, the days when he used to have a good fire of wood and stumps, and roast the chats, as they called the little refuse potatoes too small for seed, in the ashes.
They were very nice, though there was not much in one. Still they were hot and floury, and not bad with a bit of salt.
Wet days, though, were always a trouble to me, and I used to feel a kind of natural sympathy with Mr Brownsmith as he set his men jobs in the sheds, and kept walking to the doors to see if the rain had ceased.
“That’s one thing I should like to have altered in nature,” he said to me with one of his dry comical looks. “I should like the rain to come down in the night, my boy, so as to leave the day free for work. Always work.”
“I like it, sir,” I said.
“No, you don’t, you young impostor!” he cried. “You want to be playing with tops or marbles, or at football or something.”
I shook my head.