Then they all set to. Pork-pies, saveloys, sausages, cold potatoes,
hard-boiled eggs, cold bacon, veal, ham, crabs and shrimps, cheese,
butter, cold suet-puddings and treacle, gooseberry-tarts,
cherry-tarts, butter, bread, more sausages, and yet again pork-pies!
They devoured the provisions like ravening beasts, stolidly, silently,
earnestly, in large mouthfuls which they shoved down their throats
unmasticated. The intelligent foreigner seeing them thus dispose of
their food would have understood why England is a great nation. He
would have understood why Britons never, never will be slaves. They
never stopped except to drink, and then at each gulp they emptied
their glass; no heel-taps! And still they ate, and still they
drank--but as all things must cease, they stopped at last, and a long
sigh of content broke from their two-and-thirty throats.

Then the gathering broke up, and the good folk paired themselves and
separated. Harry and his lady strolled off to secluded byways in the
forest, so that they might discourse of their loves and digest their
dinner. Tom had all the morning been waiting for this happy moment; he
had counted on the expansive effect of a full stomach to thaw his
Liza's coldness, and he had pictured himself sitting on the grass with
his back against the trunk of a spreading chestnut-tree, with his arm
round his Liza's waist, and her head resting affectionately on his
manly bosom. Liza, too, had foreseen the separation into couples after
dinner, and had been racking her brains to find a means of getting out
of it.

'I don't want 'im slobberin' abaht me,' she said; 'it gives me the
sick, all this kissin' an' cuddlin'!'