“‘Well, but cook,’ says the master, ‘it’s the damper.’
“‘Well, sir,’ I says, ‘I could have told you that; but it’s my impression,’ I says, ‘that, when it’s the dryer, it won’t go a bit better, and the sooner you soot yourself the better.’ And then, instead of taking the hint to go out of my kidgin, as he would have done if he’d had the sperret of a man, he actelly went patting and poking about the things, and opening this and shutting that, till I hadn’t patience; when, because the thing left off smoking, he wanted to make out as I hadn’t pulled out one of the little drawer things in the flue.
“But there never was sich a thing as that kidginer, and nobody never knowed how to take it; sometimes it would go a-running away and making itself red-hot, and burning all the blacklead off, and sometimes it wouldn’t go at all, but stopped all black and sulky; when your bit of fowl, or whatever you were baking—roasting they called it, but if it ain’t baking a thing as is shut up inside a oven, what is it?—p’raps you’ll tell me—and, there now, it would be raw as raw, or else dry, burnt up to a cinder, while of a night there was no fire to sit by and make yourself comfortable—nothing at all but a nasty black patent thing as never looked sociable, and sent all the smell of the cooking upstairs, specially cabbage.
“No, mum, I’m much obliged, mum; and if you had been going to stop here, mum, I should have been happy to give you a trial, when you’d no doubt have found out my wally, for you look a sweet-tempered creetur; but go to a noo house, mum, I won’t—not under no consideration; and so I wish you good day, mum.”
And Mrs Martha Jinks went.
Chapter Twenty.
A Struggle for Life.
If there is any one thing in which I like to see a boy excel, it is in swimming. Now, we upright walking animals seem to be naturally the worst swimmers, and the higher and more nobly proportioned our forehead, the worse for us if in the disagreeable predicament of “a man overboard.” Horses, oxen, dogs, cats, pigs, all take to the water readily, or unreadily, and swim with ease, keeping those conveniently placed nostrils just out of water; while poor we, with all our sense and reason, unless we go through a pretty long course of preparation, paddle, splash, flounder, and most likely get drowned. Of course the principal reason for this is the large weight of head above the nostrils, this weight keeping our breathing-apertures beneath the water; while as for Sir Walter Scott, with that tremendously high forehead of his, in spite of all his knowledge he must have been one of the worst of watermen. People well acquainted with such matters tell us that to float, all we have to do is to put our hands behind us, throw back our head, and point our nose impudently at the sky; the mobile fluid will then be just round our face, and we shall float in smooth water.