“It does weigh so light this weather! Only take it in your hand,” he was bound to tell everybody, for their own sakes; “now you might scarcely think it—but what with one thing and another, that pig have cost me two and threepence a pound, and I sell him at one and ninepence!”
“Oh, Mr. Bottler, what a shame of you!”
“True, as you stand there, my dear! You might not believe it, from any one but me; till you marry, and go into business. Ah, and a very bad business it is. Starvation to everybody, unless they was bred and born to it; and even then only a crust of bread!” Mr. Churchwarden Bottler, however, did not look at all as if he sustained existence on a crust of bread. His stockings, whiter than the snow-drifts round him, showed very substantial bulge of leg, and his blue baize apron did like duty for that part of the human being which is so fatal to the race of pigs. And the soft smile, without which he never spoke, arose and subsided in no gaunt cheeks, and flickered in the channels of no paltry chin. In a word, Mr. Bottler was quite fat enough to kill.
“Polly,” he said to his favourite child, as soon as he had finished his Monday dinner; “you have been a good child through this very bad weather; and dad means to give you a rare treat to-night. Not consarning the easing of the pigs,” he continued, in answer to her usual nod, and employing his regular euphemism;—“there will be a many pigs to be eased, to satisfy the neighbourhood, and shut off the rogue to Bramber. But you shall see, Polly; you shall see something as will astonish you.”
Bottler put on his brown leathern apron, and gently performed his spiriting.
And without any nonsense, Polly saw a lovely scene soon afterwards. For her father had made up his mind to do a thing which would greatly exalt his renown, and quench that little rogue at Bramber. In spite of the weather he would kill pigs; and in spite of the weather, he would pickle them. He had five nice porkers and four bacon pigs, as ready as pigs can be for killing. They seemed to him daily to reproach him for their unduly prolonged existence. They could not lay on any fat in this weather, but relapsed for want of carving.
For Bottler in the morning had done this—which could not have occurred to any but a very superior mind. In his new premises facing the lane, a short way below Nanny Stilgoe’s cottage, he had a little yard, well away from all thatch, and abutting on nothing but his scalding-house. This yard was square, and enclosed by a wall of the chalky flints, that break so black, and bind so well into mortar.
Of course the whole place was still snowed up; but Master Bottler soon cured that. He went to the parish school, which was to have opened after the Christmas holidays on this 10th of January; but the schoolmaster vowed that, in such weather, he would warm no boy’s educational part, unless the parish first warmed his own. And the parish replied that he might do that for himself; not a knob of coal should he have; it was quite beginning at the wrong end, to warm him first. His answer was to bolt the school door, and sit down with a pipe and a little kettle.
The circumspect churchwarden had anticipated this state of siege; for he knew that every boy in the parish (who would have run like the devil if the door was open), knowing the door to be bolted, would spend the whole day in kicking at it. And here he found them, Bonny at the head, as a boy of rising intellect, and Captain Dick of the Bible-corps, and the boy who had been shot in the hedge, and many other less distinguished boys, furiously raging together because robbed of their right to a flogging.
“Come along, my lads,” said Bottler, knowing how to manage boys; “you may kick all day, and wear out your shoes. I’ve got a job for fifty of you, and a penny apiece for all as works well.”