“If you want him to like you, do just what I have advised.”
“So I will, Uncle John. Kiss me now, to make it up. Oh, you are such a dear!—donʼt you think a week would do, now?”
CHAPTER V.
At high noon of a bright cold day in the early part of March, a labourer who had been “frithing,” that is to say, cutting underwood in one of the forest copses, came out into the green track, which could scarce be called a “lane,” to eat his well–earned dinner.
As it happened to be a Monday, the poor man had a better dinner than he would see or smell again until the following Sunday. For there, as throughout rural England, a working man, receiving his wages on the Saturday evening, lives upon a sliding scale throughout the dreary week. He has his bit of hot on Sunday, smacking his lips at every morsel; and who shall scold him for staying at home to see it duly boiled, and feeling his heart move with the steaming and savoury pot–lid more kindly than with the dry parson?
And he wants his old woman ‘long of him; he see her so little all the week, and she be always best–tempered on Sundays. Let the young uns go to school to get larning—though he donʼt much see the use of it, and his father lived happy without it—‘bating that matter, which is beyond him, let them go, and then hear parson, and bring home the news to the old folk. Only let ‘em come home good time for dinner, or they had best look out. “Now, Molly, lift the pot–lid again. Oh, it do smell so good! Got ever another onion?”
Having held high feast on Sunday, and thanked the Lord, without knowing it (by inhaling happiness, and being good to the children—our Lordʼs especial favourites), off he sets on the Monday morning, to earn another eighteenpence—twopence apiece for the young uns. And he means to be jolly that day, for he has got his pinch of tobacco and two lucifers in his waistcoat pocket, and in his frail a most glorious dinner hanging from a hedge–stake.
All the dogs he meets jump up on his back; but he really cannot encourage them, with his own dog so fond of bones, and having the first right to them. Of course, his own dog is not far behind; for it is a law of nature, admitting no exception, that the poorer a man is, the more certain he is to have a dog, and the more certain that dog is to admire him.