The partiality of the sex in general for their morning and evening cup of souchong and “best refined,” is now ranked by physiologists among those inscrutable instincts of sentient nature, which are beyond the reach of scientific explanation. What oil is to the Esquimaux, what the juice of the cocoa-nut is to the monkey, what water is to the fish, what dew is to the flower, and what milk is to the cat—so is tea to woman! No person yet, in our own country, has propounded any sufficient theory to account for the English washerwomen’s all-absorbing love of the Chinese infusion—nor for the fact of every maid-servant, when stipulating the terms of her engagement, always making it an express condition of the hiring, that she should be provided with “tea and sugar,” and of every mistress continually declaring that she “would rather at any time go without her dinner than her tea.”
What sage has yet taught us why womankind is as gregarious over tea as mankind over wine? Sheridan has called the Bottle the sun of the table; but surely the Teapot, with its attendant cups, may be considered as a heavenly system, towards which all the more beautiful bodies concentre, where the piano may be said to represent the music of the spheres, and in which the gentlemen, heated with wine, and darting in eccentric course from the dining-room, may be regarded as fiery comets. We would ask any lady whether Paradise could have been a garden of bliss without the tea-plant; and whether the ever-to-be-regretted error of our first mother was not the more unpardonable from the fact of her having preferred to pilfer an apple rather than pluck the “fullest flavoured Pekoe.” And may not psychology here trace some faint transcendental reason for the descendants of Adam still loving to linger over their apples after dinner, shunning the tea-table and those connected with it. Yet, perhaps, even the eating of apples has not been more dangerous to the human family than the sipping of tea. If sin came in with pippins, surely scandal was brought into the world with Bohea! Adam fell a victim to his wife’s longing for a Ribston, and how many Eves have since fallen martyrs to the sex’s love of the slanderous Souchong.
Mrs. Sandboys was not prepared for so great a sacrifice as her tea, and when she first heard from Postlethwaite the certainty of Harker’s departure, and saw, by the result of this second journey, that there was no hope of obtaining a supply from Cockermouth, there was a moment when she allowed her bosom to whisper to her, that even the terror of a bed in London would be preferable to a tea-less life at Hassness.
Mr. Sandboys, however, no sooner saw that there was no tea or sugar to be had, than he determined to sweeten his cup with philosophy; so, bursting out with a snatch of the “Cumberland Lang Seyne,” he exclaimed, as cheerily as he could under the circumstances—
“Deuce tek the fuil-invented tea;
For tweyce a day we that mun’ hev;”
and immediately after this, decided upon the whole family’s reverting to the habits of their ancestors, and drinking “yale” for breakfast. This was by no means pleasant, but as it was clear she could do nothing else, Mrs. Sandboys, like a sensible woman, turned her attention to the contents of the ale-cask, and then discovered that some evil-disposed person, whom she strongly suspected to be Master Jobby—for that young gentleman began to display an increasing enjoyment in each succeeding catastrophe—had left the tap running, and that the cellar floor was covered three inches deep with the liquid intended to take off the dryness and somewhat sawdusty character of the oat-cake, which, in the absence of any wheaten bread, now formed the staple of their morning meal.
Now it so happened, that it wanted a fortnight of the return of Jennings’ man, the brewer, whose periodical circumgyrations with the beer, round about Buttermere, gave, like the sun, life and heat to the system of its inhabitants. In this dire emergency, Postlethwaite, whose deafness was found to increase exactly in proportion to the inconvenience of the journeys required of him, was had out, and shaken well, and bawled at, preparatory to a walk over to Lorton Vale, where the brewery was situated—only six miles distant.
But his trip on this occasion was about as successful as the last, for on reaching the spot, he found that the brewer, like the grocer, the farrier, and the publicans, had disappeared for London on the same pleasurable mission.
The family at Hassness was thus left without tea, beer, or bread, and, consequently, reduced to the pure mountain stream for their beverage, and oaten cakes and bacon for their principal diet. Their stock of fresh meat was usually procured from Frank Hutchison, the butcher of Cockermouth, but to go or send thither, under their present circumstances, appeared to be impossible. So that Mrs. Sandboys began to have serious alarms about two or three pimples that made their appearance on Cursty’s face, lest a continued course of salt meat and oat-cake should end in the whole family being afflicted with the scurvy. She would immediately have insisted on putting them, one and all, under a severe course of treacle and brimstone, with a dash of cream of tartar in it, to “sweeten their blood;” only, luckily, there was neither treacle nor brimstone, nor cream of tartar, to be had for twenty miles, nor anybody to go for it, and then, probably, nobody at Mr. Bowerbank’s to serve it.