pretty, or pleasant, or home-like; so, while we were at dinner, the
servant-girl dusted and scrubbed the counting-house chairs, and we
sat there all the rest of the day.

We had pudding before meat; and I thought Mr Holbrook was going to
make some apology for his old-fashioned ways, for he began -

"I don't know whether you like newfangled ways."

"Oh, not at all!" said Miss Matty.

"No more do I," said he. "My house-keeper WILL have these in her
new fashion; or else I tell her that, when I was a young man, we
used to keep strictly to my father's rule, 'No broth, no ball; no
ball, no beef'; and always began dinner with broth. Then we had
suet puddings, boiled in the broth with the beef: and then the
meat itself. If we did not sup our broth, we had no ball, which we
liked a deal better; and the beef came last of all, and only those
had it who had done justice to the broth and the ball. Now folks
begin with sweet things, and turn their dinners topsy-turvy."

When the ducks and green peas came, we looked at each other in
dismay; we had only two-pronged, black-handled forks. It is true
the steel was as bright as silver; but what were we to do? Miss
Matty picked up her peas, one by one, on the point of the prongs,
much as Amine ate her grains of rice after her previous feast with
the Ghoul. Miss Pole sighed over her delicate young peas as she
left them on one side of her plate untasted, for they WOULD drop
between the prongs. I looked at my host: the peas were going
wholesale into his capacious mouth, shovelled up by his large