It was nearly four o'clock when we had hauled up and were carrying the winkles on our backs down one of the untidy little roadways into Under Town. No dinner or high-tea was waiting for Uncle Jake. The house was unswept. How draggled the little bits of fern in the old china pots looked! The fire was out; the hearth piled up with ashes; and on the table stood a basin of potatoes in water, most of them unpeeled.
Uncle Jake came to a standstill, acutely alive in the midst of a domestic deadness. He raised himself upright beneath his load of winkles. "That's what I got to put up wi'," he said. "An't had a bite since breakfast at four by the clock this morning, 'cept thic sandwich o' yours. Tis a wonder how I du put up wi' it. I don' know for sure."
MEASURING UP
"Thees is what I got to put up wi'!" he repeated when Mrs Jake came in from a neighbour's.
"I forgot," she said with a gay high-pitched little laugh which had in it a tang of acquiescent despair—the echo of a mind that has ceased fighting anything, even itself.
"Forgot! Yu forgets!" Then in a softer tone: "Gie us the quart cup."
He emptied my winkles out upon the stone floor, knelt down, and measured them back into the ballast-bag: "one—two—three—four, that's one—five—six—seven—eight, that's two pecks—nine—ten—half a peck over; good for you, skipper!" He had four pecks himself, together with several small lobsters which he threw out to me.
"But you'll eat those...."
"No, I shan't. Don't want 'em. Take 'em in home for yer tay."
Then he hunted out of an inside breast-pocket a screw of newspaper, and from it took a half-crown piece: