“Dear me, sir—very sorry, sir—wouldn’t have had it happen on any account,” said Mr Pouter, stooping to pick up the mallet he had dropped upon Mr Dodd’s particular corn.
But Mr Dodd did not reply, he only limped about the room with anguish depicted upon every feature, while Mr Pouter tremblingly went on with his work.
“There!” exclaimed Mary, upon reaching the kitchen, “I declare if I’ll stop. There’s nothing but messing going on from morning till night. It’s too bad! for there’s that Pouter again, chipping and hammering, and sending the dust a-flying all over the room worse than ever.”
“What was all that noise?” croaked Cook, a very red-faced and red-armed lady.
“Carpenter dropped one of his tools on master’s toe, and sent him a-hopping about the room like a singed monkey,” exclaimed Mary, in a tone of the deepest disgust. And it must be said that this was a very disrespectful and doubtful simile, for the odds were strongly against Mary Housemaid having seen a monkey suffering from the effects of fire.
“What’s the carpenter a-doing of?” said Cook, who was busy making paste, and now paused to have her question answered, and to rub her itching nose with the rolling-pin.
“Why,” exclaimed Cook’s mortal enemy, the Buttons, “master said as old Pouter was to come and fix a jam—something or other.”
“There, now, you be off into the hairy and finish them shoes,” exclaimed Mrs Cook, fiercely. “Nobody arst your opinion; so come, now, be off!”
Buttons did “be off,” for under the circumstances it would have been rash to have stayed, since Mrs Cook was going at him, rolling-pin in hand, with the very evident intention of using it in the same way as her friend Q1866 did his truncheon. But Buttons was not going to be bundled out of the kitchen that way “he knowed,” so he took his revenge by flattening his nose against the kitchen-window, just where he would be most in his culinary tyrant’s light; and then in pantomimic show he began to deride Mrs Cook’s actions, till that lady rushed out at him, when he retreated to his den beneath the pavement, and went on with his work for quite five minutes, then, with a shoe covering one hand and a brush in the other, he made his appearance at the kitchen-door, to deliver the following mystic announcement:—
“It worn’t a jam, it were a preserver,” but he retreated again with great rapidity to avoid the paste pin launched at his head by the irate cook, but the utensil only struck the closed door, when Master Buttons again inserted his head to howl out a derisive “Boo-o-o,” and then disappeared till dinner time.