Page:Eliot - Adam Bede, vol. III, 1859.djvu/317

Rh You don't value your peas for their roots, or your carrots for their flowers. Now that's the way you should choose women: their cleverness 'll never come to much—never come to much; but they make excellent simpletons, ripe and strong-flavoured."

"What dost say to that?" said Mr Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife.

"Say!" answered Mrs Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; "why, I say as some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i" their own inside ". ..

Mrs Poyser would probably have brought her rejoinder to a further climax, if every one's attention had not at this moment been called to the other end of the table, where the lyrism, which had at first only manifested itself by David's sotto voce performance of "My love's a rose without a thorn," had gradually assumed a rather deafening and complex character. Tim, thinking slightly of David's vocalisation, was impelled to supersede that feeble buzz by a spirited commencement of "Three Merry Mowers;" but David was not to be put down so easily, and showed himself capable of a copious