After his day’s round, Mr. Hobbs returned home to his tea. For this meal he was glad to see a plate of pink prawns on the table. If he had one weakness of the epicure, it was in the direction of prawns, and Mrs. Hobbs, when in a specially good humour, was wont to indulge him. This happened with her perhaps the more rarely, as her husband was wont on these occasions, while praising the quality of the prawns, which he rated as being nearly equal to Gravesend shrimps, to inveigh against Colonial provisions generally.
“The meat was not equal to English meat—not the flavour—the vegetables were tasteless, and the fruit lacking in juice.”
These remarks on the products of her native land made Mrs. Hobbs mad and restive.
“If everything was so good in England, why in the name of fortune did you leave it?”
“I wish I had not, and that’s the truth,” Mr. Hobbs would reply.
“And I wish so too!” would retort his good lady.
Then would follow a domestic squall, during which Mrs. Hobbs launched forth in voluble Anglo-Saxon on the worthlessness of men in general, and this one in particular.
In the meantime her husband leisurely ate up the prawns.
This night was an exception. The meal passed without the customary equinoctial, and Mrs. Hobbs got her fair share of the shrimps.
“I can tell you what it is, Tom, if you go jumping in the water again with your uniform clothes on, and expect me to wash them and get them decent, you are very much mistaken; somebody else may do them, I won’t. Such a job, with all the nasty salt water in them. If that brazen-faced hussy wants to drown herself let her. Good riddance, I say, to bad rubbish. If it had been me, now, you would not have been so quick, I’ll be bound.”