Page:Tom Brown's School Days.djvu/127

Rh 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 days 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 ancles, they want to get to grass." "Better be doing that, than gone altogether like yours," &c. &c. 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 were 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," &c. How she ever kept the accounts so straight as she did, in her head and on her slate, was a perfect wonder.

East and Tom got served at last, and started back for the School-house, just as the locking-up bell began to ring; East on the way recounting the