“Mary Jane, if you call that a roast goose, I cull it a burning shame!”

Mary Jane, peeling potatoes with her back to the window, and tossing them one by one into a bucket of water, gave a jump, and cut her finger, dropping forthwith a half-peeled magnum bonum, which struck the bucket’s edge and slid away across the slate flooring under the table.

“Awgh—­awgh!” she burst out, catching up her apron and clutching it round the cut.  “Look what you’ve done, Miss Ruby! an’ me miles away, thinkin’ o’ shipwrecks an’ dead swollen men.”

“Look at the Chris’mas dinner, you mazed creature!”

In truth, the goose was fast spoiling.  The roasting apparatus in this kitchen was a simple matter, consisting of a nail driven into the centre of the chimney-piece, a number of worsted threads depending therefrom, and a steel hook attached to these threads.  Fix the joint or fowl firmly on the hook, give it a spin with the hand, and the worsted threads wound, unwound, and wound again, turning it before the blaze—­an admirable jack, if only looked after.  At present it hung motionless over the dripping-pan, and the goose wore a suit of motley, exhibiting a rich Vandyke brown to the fire, an unhealthy yellow to the window.

“There now!” Mary Jane rushed to the jack and gave it a spin, while Ruby walked round by the back door, and appeared dripping on the threshold.  “I declare ‘tis like Troy Town this morning:  wrecks and rumours o’ wrecks.  Now ’tis ‘Ropes! ropes!’ an’ nex’ ’tis ’Where be the stable key, Mary Jane, my dear?’ an’ then agen, ’Will’ee be so good as to fetch master’s second-best spy-glass, Mary Jane, an’ look slippy?’—­an’ me wi’ a goose to stuff, singe, an’ roast, an’ ‘tatties to peel, an’ greens to cleanse, an’ apples to chop for sauce, an’ the hoarders no nearer away than the granary loft, with a gatherin’ ‘pon your second toe an’ the half o’ ’em rotten when you get there.  The pore I be in!  Why, Miss Ruby, you’m streamin’-leakin’!”

“I’m wet through, Mary Jane; an’ I don’t care if I die.”  Ruby sank on the settle, and fairly broke down.

“Hush ’ee now, co!”

“I don’t, I don’t, an’ I don’t!  I’m tired o’ the world, an’ my heart’s broke.  Mary Jane, you selfish thing, you’ve never asked about my banns, no more’n the rest; an’ after that cast-off frock, too, that I gave you last week so good as new!”

“Was it very grand, Miss Ruby?  Was it shuddery an’ yet joyful—­ lily-white an’ yet rosy-red—­hot an’ yet cold—­’don’t lift me so high,’ an’ yet ’praise God, I’m exalted above women’?”

“’Twas all and yet none.  ‘Twas a voice speakin’ my name, sweet an’ terrible, an’ I longed for it to go on an’ on; and then came the Gauger stunnin’ and shoutin’ ‘Wreck! wreck!’ like a trumpet, an’ the church was full o’ wind, an’ the folk ran this way an’ that, like sheep, an’ left me sittin’ there.  I’ll—­I’ll die an old maid, I will, if only to s—­spite such ma—­ma—­manners!”