It was a goodly sight--that table, with Martin Poyser's round
good-humoured face and large person at the head of it helping his
servants to the fragrant roast beef and pleased when the empty plates
came again. Martin, though usually blest with a good appetite, really
forgot to finish his own beef to-night--it was so pleasant to him to
look on in the intervals of carving and see how the others enjoyed their
supper; for were they not men who, on all the days of the year except
Christmas Day and Sundays, ate their cold dinner, in a makeshift manner,
under the hedgerows, and drank their beer out of wooden bottles--with
relish certainly, but with their mouths towards the zenith, after a
fashion more endurable to ducks than to human bipeds. Martin Poyser had
some faint conception of the flavour such men must find in hot roast
beef and fresh-drawn ale. He held his head on one side and screwed
up his mouth, as he nudged Bartle Massey, and watched half-witted Tom
Tholer, otherwise known as "Tom Saft," receiving his second plateful of
beef. A grin of delight broke over Tom's face as the plate was set down
before him, between his knife and fork, which he held erect, as if
they had been sacred tapers. But the delight was too strong to continue
smouldering in a grin--it burst out the next instant in a long-drawn
"haw, haw!" followed by a sudden collapse into utter gravity, as the
knife and fork darted down on the prey.
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