“They are all well,” I called out to him, “in spite of the cold.”
“They was matted up yesterday,” answered the old man, pointing downwards to my pets. Then he went on to say how he and the gardeners strengthened the artificial hedge on the east side, by adding fir branches and some mats, “for it was fit to blow their feathers out, that mortal sharp was the eastwinder;” and Burbidge looked at my pets with indulgent pity, and added, “They be nesh folks, be canaries, for all they write about them.” Then he suspected Bess of giving them forbidden food. “They mustn’t have no green food. It be as bad for ’em as spring showers be for sucking gulleys” (goslings), he added, “and that be certain death.”
“But I haven’t given them anything not allowed,” stammered out Bess, indignantly; “mama and I have only given them what we always do.”
“Ah!” said Burbidge, softening, “that won’t be no hurt then; and as to potato and apple, they be the best quill revivers out, come winter. But what sort of apple was it?”
I replied that the apple was a “Blenheim Orange” and no American.
“NO NEED OF FOREIGN STUFF”
“No need of foreign stuff in Shropshire,” answered Burbidge, proudly. “Our late apples are as sound as if they were only fruited yesterday.”
Then I told him that the potato was one of the same sort that I had last night at dinner—floury, sweet and mealy.
“Then I’ll be bound,” he replied, “you had an Up-to-Dater, or may be a Sutton’s Abundance; they be both sound as a sovereign, real gold all through. No blotches or specks in they. We had four roods of both on the farm. Fresh land, no manure and a dusty summer, and tatters will take care of theirselves; but come a wet year, a field potato is worth two in a garden, although I says it as shouldn’t, but truth is truth, although you have to look up a black chimney to find it, as folks say.”
Then old Burbidge went on to tell me how “Potatoes be right house wenches in a garden, or same as clouts to floors; but don’t you go to takin’ ’em from their nature too early, for when the tops bleed the tubers will never be fit for squire’s food, only fit for a petty tradesman’s table,” and this with Burbidge is always a dark, and outer land of disgrace.