Quebec and Malta here exclaim, with clapping of hands, that Bluffy is sure to bring mother something, and begin to speculate on what it will be.

“Do you know, Lignum,” says Mrs. Bagnet, casting a glance on the table-cloth, and winking “salt!” at Malta with her right eye, and shaking the pepper away from Quebec with her head, “I begin to think George is in the roving way again.”

“George,” returns Mr. Bagnet, “will never desert.  And leave his old comrade.  In the lurch.  Don’t be afraid of it.”

“No, Lignum.  No.  I don’t say he will.  I don’t think he will.  But if he could get over this money trouble of his, I believe he would be off.”

Mr. Bagnet asks why.

“Well,” returns his wife, considering, “George seems to me to be getting not a little impatient and restless.  I don’t say but what he’s as free as ever.  Of course he must be free or he wouldn’t be George, but he smarts and seems put out.”

“He’s extra-drilled,” says Mr. Bagnet.  “By a lawyer.  Who would put the devil out.”

“There’s something in that,” his wife assents; “but so it is, Lignum.”

Further conversation is prevented, for the time, by the necessity under which Mr. Bagnet finds himself of directing the whole force of his mind to the dinner, which is a little endangered by the dry humour of the fowls in not yielding any gravy, and also by the made gravy acquiring no flavour and turning out of a flaxen complexion.  With a similar perverseness, the potatoes crumble off forks in the process of peeling, upheaving from their centres in every direction, as if they were subject to earthquakes.  The legs of the fowls, too, are longer than could be desired, and extremely scaly.  Overcoming these disadvantages to the best of his ability, Mr. Bagnet at last dishes and they sit down at table, Mrs. Bagnet occupying the guest’s place at his right hand.

It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious.  Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that is in the nature of poultry to possess is developed in these specimens in the singular form of guitar-strings.  Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their breasts and bodies, as aged trees strike roots into the earth.  Their legs are so hard as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises and the walking of matches.  But Mr. Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs. Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment’s disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully.  How young Woolwich cleans the drum-sticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand.