Said the farmer, recovering his sense of superiority
to the guest whom he obliged with a supper, “In
ten minutes.” Then, after a pause, and
in a tone of deprecation, as if he feared he might
be thought fine, he continued, “We don’t
sup in the kitchen. My father did, and so did
I till I married; but my Bess, though she’s
as good a farmer’s wife as ever wore shoe-leather,
was a tradesman’s daughter, and had been brought
up different. You see she was not without a good
bit of money: but even if she had been, I should
not have liked her folks to say I had lowered her;
so we sup in the parlour.”
Quoth Kenelm, “The first consideration is to
sup at all. Supper conceded, every man is more
likely to get on in life who would rather sup in his
parlour than his kitchen. Meanwhile, I see a pump;
while you go to the cows I will stay here and wash
my hands of them.”
“Hold! you seem a sharp fellow, and certainly
no fool. I have a son, a good smart chap, but
stuck up; crows it over us all; thinks no small beer
of himself. You’d do me a service, and him
too, if you’d let him down a peg or two.”
Kenelm, who was now hard at work at the pump-handle,
only replied by a gracious nod. But as he seldom
lost an opportunity for reflection, he said to himself,
while he laved his face in the stream from the spout,
“One can’t wonder why every small man thinks
it so pleasant to let down a big one, when a father
asks a stranger to let down his own son for even fancying
that he is not small beer. It is upon that principle
in human nature that criticism wisely relinquishes
its pretensions as an analytical science, and becomes
a lucrative profession. It relies on the pleasure
its readers find in letting a man down.”
IT was a pretty, quaint farmhouse, such as might well
go with two or three hundred acres of tolerably good
land, tolerably well farmed by an active old-fashioned
tenant, who, though he did not use mowing-machines
nor steam-ploughs nor dabble in chemical experiments,
still brought an adequate capital to his land and made
the capital yield a very fair return of interest.
The supper was laid out in a good-sized though low-pitched
parlour with a glazed door, now wide open, as were
all the latticed windows, looking into a small garden,
rich in those straggling old English flowers which
are nowadays banished from gardens more pretentious
and; infinitely less fragrant. At one corner
was an arbour covered with honeysuckle, and opposite
to it a row of beehives. The room itself had
an air of comfort, and that sort of elegance which
indicates the presiding genius of feminine taste.
There were shelves suspended to the wall by blue ribbons,
and filled with small books neatly bound; there were
flower-pots in all the window-sills; there was a small
cottage piano; the walls were graced partly with engraved
portraits of county magnates and prize oxen; partly
with samplers in worsted-work, comprising verses of
moral character and the names and birthdays of the
farmer’s grandmother, mother, wife, and daughters.
Over the chimney-piece was a small mirror, and above
that the trophy of a fox’s brush; while niched
into an angle in the room was a glazed cupboard, rich
with specimens of old china, Indian and English.
