The kitchen is the Bishop’s favorite room.  This is not at all because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is one of the finest rooms in the house.  The Bishop has neither the income nor the appetite to have his cooking done there.  The windows, high up in the wall, look north and south.  The north window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an open door near the corner to the left.  Through this door we have a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine.  In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the upper floors of the palace.  In the wall to our right is the immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand shops.  In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop’s study, formerly a scullery.  Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall.  Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs:  four on the far side, three on the near side, and two at each end.  There is a big chair with railed back and sides on the hearth.  On the floor is a drugget of thick fibre matting.  The only other piece of furniture is a clock with a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude; but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it going.  It hangs above the oak chest.

The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop’s lady, Mrs Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the greengrocer.  He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon.  Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white threads.  She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist.  His muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their lower ends.  He is an affable man, with those perfect manners which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so unquestionable that they are not anxious about it.  He is a reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always implies that he does it with your kind permission.  Withal by no means servile:  rather gallant and compassionate, but never without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social distinctions.  He is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.