Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and did eat it six days out of seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork; sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied it with pig-meat—good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat—such as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the "mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine eater—a true Homeric diner—and to make it even, Iden junior sent in the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about the only amenity that survived between father and son.
The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of it is best done on a gridiron—here's heresy! A gridiron is flat blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.
But the "mouse,"—what was the "mouse?" The London butchers can't tell me. It was a titbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk are so ignorant.
Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.
He was up at five o'clock every morning of his life, pottering about the great oven with his baker's man. In summer if it was fine he went out at six for a walk in the Pines—the promenade of Woolhorton.
"If you wants to get well," old Dr. Butler used to say, "you go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver."
Before the air has been breathed over—inspired and re-inspired by human crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh from the spring; that was when it possessed its value, according to bluff, gruff, rule-of-thumb old Butler. Depend upon it, there is something in his dictum, too.
Amaryllis hesitated at the thought of the pork, for he often had it underdone, so the old gentleman dismissed her in his most gracious manner to dine with the rest.
She went down the corridor and took the seat placed for her. There was a posy of primroses beside her napkin—posies of primroses all round the table.
This raging old Tory of ninety years would give a shilling for the earliest primrose the boys could find for him in the woods. Some one got him a peacock's feather which had fallen from Beaconsfield's favourites—a real Beaconsfield peacock-feather—which he had set in the centre of a splendid screen of feathers that cost him twenty guineas. The screen was upstairs in the great drawing-room near a bow window which overlooked the fair.