" And they crossed the street and walked
into the cleanest little front room of a small house, half parlour,
half shop, and bought a pound of most particular sausages, East talking
pleasantly to Mrs. Porter while she put them in paper, and Tom doing the
paying part.
From Porter's they adjourned to Sally Harrowell's, where they found a
lot of School-house boys waiting for the roast potatoes, and relating
their own exploits in the day's match at the top of their voices. The
street opened at once into Sally's kitchen, a low brick-floored room,
with large recess for fire, and chimney-corner seats. Poor little Sally,
the most good-natured and much-enduring of womankind, was bustling
about, with a napkin in her hand, from her own oven to those of the
neighbours' cottages up the yard at the back of the house. Stumps, her
husband, a short, easy-going shoemaker, with a beery, humorous eye and
ponderous calves, who lived mostly on his wife's earnings, stood in
a corner of the room, exchanging shots of the roughest description of
repartee with every boy in turn. "Stumps, you lout, you've had too
much beer again to-day." "'Twasn't of your paying for, then." "Stumps's
calves are running down into his ankles; they want to get to grass."
"Better be doing that than gone altogether like yours," etc. Very poor
stuff it was, but it served to make time pass; and every now and then
Sally arrived in the middle with a smoking tin of potatoes, which was
cleared off in a few seconds, each boy as he seized his lot running
off to the house with "Put me down two-penn'orth, Sally;" "Put down
three-penn'orth between me and Davis," etc.
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