"None can trust to that in young men," answered his sister, "as you ought best to know, brother."
Old Anthony winced, and became purple at this allusion to his own marriage. He started up, struck the snuff-box across the table, then seated himself again, and said grimly: "I asked you, sister, if you could eat and digest a good, wholesome dinner, and I gave it you; but, by Heaven, you have come here and fed me with unwholesome and unsavoury diet that I cannot digest, and that gives me a worry and heartburn. I wish you had never come."
CHAPTER VII. IN THE HARE AND HOUNDS.
In the tavern with the sign of the Hare and Hounds, a fire of peat was burning on the hearth. A huge oak settle occupied the side of the fireplace opposite to the window; and beneath and before the window was a long table, the end of which admitted of being drawn out so as to make it serve as a shuffle-board for the use of such as liked to play at that game so popular in the reign of Elizabeth, illicit in the time of the Commonwealth, and at the epoch of my story almost obsolete, except in stray corners remote from fashion.
The settle was of a construction then usual, now rarely met with, and therefore deserving a description as a domestic curiosity. The seat was on hinges, and could be raised, disclosing beneath it a cavity like a clothes chest; the settle back opened in compartments and revealed sides of bacon and hams that had been smoked, and there awaited cutting up. Above the heads of those who sat in the settle was a sort of projecting roof to cut off all down draught; but this also served as a cupboard for vinegar, salt, spices, and other groceries. The chest, that was also seat, to a mother with an infant, was of extraordinary service; when she was engaged at the fire, baking or cooking, she raised the lid or seat and buttoned it back, then she planted the babe in the box, where it lay warm and secure, close to her, without the chance of coming to harm. If the child were in the age of toddledum, then it ran up and down in the box with the little hands on the edge, saw its mother, crowed to her, watched her proceedings, and ran no risk of falling into the fire, or of pulling over and breaking the crockery. Altogether the settle was a great institution, and the march of culture, instead of improving it, has abolished it. More is the pity.
The fireplace was of granite uncarved, but rudely chamfered, very wide and very deep, so deep as to allow of a seat recessed in the wall at the side, in which a chilly old man might sit and toast his knees, protected from the down draught and falling soot by the arched roof of the recess. It used to be said of one of these great fireplaces, in which wood and peat were burned, that a necessary accompaniment was an old man and a pair of tongs, for the logs when burnt through in the midst fell apart, and required some one at hand to pick the ends up, and reverse them on the hearth, and to collect and repile the turfs when they fell down. At the fire-breast burnt, what was called a "spane," that is, a slip of deal steeped in resin, which lighted the housewife at her operations at the fire. But the "spane" emitted more smoke than light. Opposite to the ingle-nook was the "cloam" oven, that is, the earthenware oven let into the wall for baking.
In more ancient times ovens were constructed with enormous labour out of granite blocks, which were scooped out in the middle, but the disadvantage attendant on granite was that it became in time resolved into sand by heat, and crumbled away like sugar.[1] These were rapidly got rid of when the earthenware oven was introduced, and hardly a specimen remains. Not so, however, with the stone frying-pan, which is only just, and not altogether, superseded. Housewives contend that the iron pan is not so good at frying as the scooped-out pan of stone, and that rashers of bacon done in the latter are incomparably superior to those burnt in iron. Thus, it will be seen that in the West we are only recently, in some particulars emerging from the Stone-Age, but it is with a leap over that of Bronze into the era of Iron.[2]
The walls of the "mug-house" of the Hare and Hounds were well white-washed and ornamented with a quantity of broadside ballads, the illustrations very generally bearing no intelligible relation to the letterpress.