"But twenty-two years old!" cried Boodles. "She would be much too tough to eat."
"Aw, my dear life," chuckled Mary. "He wouldn't be tough. I would kill 'en, and draw 'en, and rub a little salt in his belly, and hang 'en up for a fortnight, and he would et butiful, my dear."
Boodles laughed delightfully, and said she thought no amount of salt or hanging, to say nothing of sage and onions, could ever make the venerable Sal palatable.
"Peter wun't let 'en be killed. Peter loves Old Sal," Mary went on. "He laid sixteen eggs last year, and he'm the best mother on Dartmoor. Aw ees, my dear. He be a cruel fine mother, and Peter ses he shan't die till he've a mind to."
Then Boodles got to business and asked Mary for eggs, not those of Old Sal, but the produce of the hen-house. Mary said she would go and search. As it was dirty in that region Boodles declined to go with her. "Please to go inside. There be only Gran'vaither. Go and have a look at 'en, my dear," said Mary, who always referred to Grandfather as if he had been a living soul. "Hit 'en in the belly, and make 'en strike at ye."
Boodles went into Hut Circle Number One, which was Peter's residence, and stood in the presence of Grandfather. Obeying Mary's instructions, she hit him "in the belly." The old sinner made weird noises when thus disturbed. He appeared to resent the treatment, as most old gentlemen would have done. He refused to strike, but he rattled himself, and wheezed, and made sounds suggestive of expectoration. Grandfather was a savage like Peter. He was a rough uneducated sort of clock, and he had no passion for Boodles. Pendoggat would have been the man for him. Grandfather would have shaken hands with Pendoggat had it been possible. His own quivering hands were stretched across his lying face, announcing quarter-past nine when it was really five o'clock. Grandfather was a true man of Devon. He had no sense of time.
Boodles had nothing but contertipt for the old fellow. Having assaulted him she opened his case. Evidently Grandfather had been drinking. His interior smelt strongly of cider. There were splashes of it everywhere; rank cider distilled from the lees; in one spot moisture was pronounced, suggesting that Grandfather had recently been indulging. Apparently he liked his liquor strong. Grandfather was a picker-up of unconsidered trifles also. He was full of pins; all kinds of pins, bent and straight. Item, Grandfather had a little money of his own; several battered coppers, some green coins which had no doubt been dug up outside, or discovered upon the "deads" beside one of the neighbouring wheals, and there was a real fourpenny-bit with a hole through it. Fastened to the back of the case behind the pendulum was a scrap of sheepskin as hard as wood, and upon it some hand had painfully drawn what appeared to be an elementary exercise in geometry. Boodles frowned and wondered what it all meant.
"Here be the eggs, my dear. Twenty for a shillun to yew, and ten to a foreigner," said Mary, standing in the door, making an apron out of her ragged skirt, and blissfully unconscious that she was exposing the sack-like bloomers which were her only underwear.
"Twenty-one, Mary. There's always one thrown in for luck and me," pleaded Boodles.
"Aw ees. One for yew, my dear," Mary assented.