"One cundler" in the kitchen brought us to a dead-lock for full five minutes. At last Mr. Scorer pointed to a battered implement with its bottom full of holes, hanging on the wall, and said, triumphantly, "That's it."
"What in heaven's name is it?" I asked, gazing suspiciously at the shapeless object.
"Why, you squeedge your cabbages through it," he said.
"Oh, I see, a colander."
The humours of that inventory come upon me still in the dark night watches at times, and I laugh internally till my wife wakes up and advises me to get up and take a dose of camphor if I feel as bad as all that.
The larger articles, such as bedsteads and chairs and washstands, we easily identified, and these we triumphantly ticked off first, and then gradually worried out the smaller ones.
"One indimat" caused us some trouble in the best bedroom, but finally a strip of straw matting, two feet by one, was hauled out from its lurking-place under the washstand, whither it had crept for concealment, and reluctantly answered to its name.
The crockery was heterogeneous, and was slumped under colour-headings.
"Three cupps pink; one sosir pink; three cupps blew; four sosirs blew (one crack)," and so on.
That searching inventory went right to the root of things, and by its fiat-justitia-ruat-cœlum candour impressed me most favourably with the stark, staring, straight-forward honesty of Mr. Joseph Scorer.