“Ay, ay, Giles—what do I call ye? Maister, I would say. But ’tis well to think the day is done, when ’tis done.”
Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying about everywhere. “Do you think it went off well, Creedle?” he asked.
“The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good, honest drink ’twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best wine that berries could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while that egg-flip would ha’ passed through muslin, so little curdled ’twere. ’Twas good enough to make any king’s heart merry—ay, to make his whole carcass smile. Still, I don’t deny I’m afeared some things didn’t go well with He and his.” Creedle nodded in a direction which signified where the Melburys lived.
“I’m afraid, too, that it was a failure there!”
“If so, ’twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else’s plate as hers.”
“What snail?”
“Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves of wintergreen.”
“How the deuce did a snail get there?”
“That I don’t know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman was.”
“But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn’t have been!”