Page:Tom Brown's School Days (6th ed).djvu/146

 and walked into the cleanest little front room of a small house, half parlor, 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 neighbors' 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., 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 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," etc. 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 life and adventures of Stumps, who was a character. Among his other small avocations, he was the hind carrier of a sedan-chair, the last of its race, in which the Rugby ladies still went out to tea, and in which, when he was fairly