“This is a very fine old dish, madam,” remarked Mr. Ashby.
“Oh yes, it’s a bit of old blue I’ve had in the kitchen for years. I remember how mother used to heap up this same plate with scones, for us chillern,” replied the woman, smiling at the platter.
“Are there many such pieces of blue in this section of the country?” asked Mr. Fabian, while Polly and her companions listened eagerly for the reply.
“Summat; but my gude mon stacked our’n up in the back-shed when us wanted to use the front cupboard for my new chiny.”
“Would you like to sell it?” was Mr. Ashby’s tense query.
“D’ye think it would be wuth summat? I’ do be thinking of laying by a few bits, this year, to buy us a wool carpet.”
“Perhaps we will buy some pieces and pay you as much as anyone else you might meet,” suggested Mr. Fabian.
As they entered the low-ceiled room of the cottage, the woman said: “Come out back and we won’t have to carry so far to the front room.”
She went through a tiny door that opened to the small lean-to, and then began taking all sorts of old dishes from the corner cupboard that her husband had constructed to hold the accumulation of generations. As the collectors saw choice pieces so carelessly handled they held their breaths in dread.
“Now this old blue belonged to my gran’faither afore it come down to us. He, and my faither after him, lived on this same farm. Us had no son so the home come to me as eldest of the family.”