economic dishes; and the
carpenter, obedient to her supplications, had promised, in the event of
his outliving her, that no hands but his should have the making of her
coffin. "It is so nice," she said, "to think one's own husband will put
together the box you are to lie in, of his own make!" Had they been even
a doubtfully united pair, the cook's anticipation of a comfortable
coffin, the work of the best carpenter in England, would have kept them
together; and that which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
needs not to be recounted to those who have read a chapter or two of the
natural history of the male sex.

"Crickledon, my dear soul, your husband is labouring with a bit of fun,"
Herbert said to her.

"He would n't laugh loud at Punch, for fear of an action," she replied.
"He never laughs out till he gets to bed, and has locked the door; and
when he does he says 'Hush!' to me. Tinman is n't bailiff again just yet,
and where he has his bailiff's best Court suit from, you may ask. He
exercises in it off and on all the week, at night, and sometimes in the
middle of the day."

Herbert rallied her for her gossip's credulity.

"It's truth," she declared. "I have it from the maid of the house, little
Jane, whom he pays four pound a year for all the work of the house: a
clever little thing with her hands and her head she is; and can read and
write beautiful; and she's a mind to leave 'em if they don't advance her.
She knocked and went in while he was full blaze, and bowing his poll to
his glass. And now he turns the key, and a child might know he was at
it."

"He can't be such a donkey!"

"And he's been seen at the window on the seaside. 'Who's your Admiral
staying at the house on the beach?' men have inquired as they come
ashore. My husband has heard it. Tinman's got it on his brain. He might
be cured by marriage to a sound-headed woman, but he 'll soon be wanting
to walk about in silk legs if he stops a bachelor. They tell me his old
mother here had a dress value twenty pound; and pomp's inherited. Save as
he may, there's his leak."

Herbert's contempt for Tinman was intense; it was that of the young and
ignorant who live in their imaginations like spendthrifts, unaware of the
importance of them as the food of life, and of how necessary it is to
seize upon the solider one among them for perpetual sustenance when the
unsubstantial are vanishing. The great event of his bailiff's term of
office had become