"
Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table,
pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its
exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself
to pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping
half of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement
to cut slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities
with the butter-plate; and in all other respects behaving less like a
civilized Christian than the worst kind of an ogre. Being by this
time fully gorged, he crowned his amiable exploits with a draught
from the water pitcher, and then favored us with his opinion about
the business in hand. And, certainly, though they proceeded out of
an unwiped mouth, his expressions did him honor.
"Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate
bacon," said Silas, like a sensible man as he was. "That's what she
wants. Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the
kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or
two, she'll begin to look like a creature of this world."
So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.
V. UNTIL BEDTIME
Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his
coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a
lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in
order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own
phrase, "something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may
imply) at the shoemaking business.
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