"Send the landlord, please."
The landlord comes, bowing low, and we make inquiries concerning the distance to Paultons, the estate where the Boyces have been spending the summer, and where we venture to hope they still are. He says it is a matter of four miles, and that we can have a fly over for six shillings. We order the fly to be got ready at once, and inquire if we can have dinner now, it being late in the afternoon.
"Yes, sir," he replies. "Would you like some chicken and sparrowgrass?"
"How long will they be in cooking?"
"Matter of arf an hour, sir."
As this means a matter of an hour, I ask if he can't get us up something in a shorter time. He suggests that chops can be cooked sooner.
"Chops be it, then. In the words of the immortal Pickwick, chops and tomato sauce."
"No tomarter sauce, sir," with profound gravity.
"Sparrowgrass, then—chops and sparrowgrass."
He retires, and we all rush to the windows and look out upon the quaint old village—a curious, old-fashioned scene. We feel as if we had somehow become transmogrified, and instead of being flesh-and-blood men and women from practical New York, were playing our parts in some old English novel. Odd little tumble-down houses, with peaked roofs and mullioned windows, ranged about a triangular common, look sleepily out upon a statue of Palmerston in the middle of the open place, the gray walls of Romsey Abbey, a thousand years old, against the blue sky behind them.