It will grow upon you, I am sure, as it did upon Mrs. Pollock, with all her peculiar fancies, and as it ’as grown upon us.—­We formerly had a butcher’s shop in Buffington, and it was naturally a great responsibility.  Mr. Heaven’s nerves are not strong, and at last he wanted a life of more quietude, more quietude was what he craved.  The life of a retail butcher is a most exciting and wearying one.  Nobody satisfied with their meat; as if it mattered in a world of change!  Everybody complaining of too much bone or too little fat; nobody wishing tough chops or cutlets, but always seeking after fine joints, when it’s against reason and nature that all joints should be juicy and all cutlets tender; always complaining if livers are not sent with every fowl, always asking you to remember the trimmin’s, always wanting their beef well ’ung, and then if you ’ang it a minute too long, it’s left on your ’ands!  I often used to say to Mr. Heaven, yes many’s the time I’ve said it, that if people would think more of the great ’ereafter and less about their own little stomachs, it would be a deal better for them, yes, a deal better, and make it much more comfortable for the butchers!”

* * *

Burd Alane has had a good quarter of an hour to-day.

His spouse took a brief promenade with him.  To be sure, it was during an absence of the flock on the other side of the hedge so that the moral effect of her spasm of wifely loyalty was quite lost upon them.  I strongly suspect that she would not have granted anything but a secret interview.  What a petty, weak, ignoble character!  I really don’t like to think so badly of any fellow-creature as I am forced to think of that politic, time-serving, pusillanimous goose.  I believe she laid the egg that produced the idiot gosling!

CHAPTER IX

Here follows the true story of Sir Muscovy Drake, the Lady Blanche, and Miss Malardina Crippletoes.

Phoebe’s flock consisted at first mostly of Brown Mallards, but a friend gave her a sitting of eggs warranted to produce a most beautiful variety of white ducks.  They were hatched in due time, but proved hard to raise, till at length there was only one survivor, of such uncommon grace and beauty that we called her the Lady Blanche.  Presently a neighbour sold Phoebe his favourite Muscovy drake, and these two splendid creatures by “natural selection” disdained to notice the rest of the flock, but forming a close friendship, wandered in the pleasant paths of duckdom together, swimming and eating quite apart from the others.

In the brown flock there was one unfortunate, misshapen from the egg, quite lame, and with no smoothness of plumage; but on that very account, apparently, or because she was too weak to resist them, the others treated her cruelly, biting her and pushing her away from the food.