that Jack trotted off
round the corner to the Ship that very afternoon; for that faithful
little nose of his, as it sniffed out of a back window of the school,
had given him warning of Sabean gales, and scents of Paradise, from the
inn kitchen below; so he went round, and asked for his pot of small ale
(his only luxury), and stood at the bar to drink it; and looked inward
with his little twinkling right eye, and sniffed inward with his little
curling right nostril, and beheld, in the kitchen beyond, salad in
stacks and fagots: salad of lettuce, salad of cress and endive, salad of
boiled coleworts, salad of pickled coleworts, salad of angelica, salad
of scurvy-wort, and seven salads more; for potatoes were not as yet, and
salads were during eight months of the year the only vegetable. And on
the dresser, and before the fire, whole hecatombs of fragrant victims,
which needed neither frankincense nor myrrh; Clovelly herrings and
Torridge salmon, Exmoor mutton and Stow venison, stubble geese and
woodcocks, curlew and snipe, hams of Hampshire, chitterlings of Taunton,
and botargos of Cadiz, such as Pantagruel himself might have devoured.
And Jack eyed them, as a ragged boy eyes the cakes in a pastrycook's
window; and thought of the scraps from the commoners' dinner, which were
his wages for cleaning out the hall; and meditated deeply on the unequal
distribution of human bliss.

"Ah, Mr. Brimblecombe!" said the host, bustling out with knife and apron
to cool himself in the passage. "Here are doings! Nine gentlemen to
supper!"

"Nine! Are they going to eat all that?"

"Well, I can't say--that Mr. Amyas is as good as three to his trencher:
but still there's crumbs, Mr. Brimblecombe, crumbs; and waste not
want not is my doctrine; so you and I may have a somewhat to stay our
stomachs, about an eight o'clock."

"Eight?" said Jack, looking wistfully at the clock. "It's but four now.
Well, it's kind of you, and perhaps I'll look in."

"Just you step in now, and look to this venison. There's a breast! you
may lay your two fingers into the say there, and not get to the bottom
of the fat. That's Sir Richard's sending. He's all for them Leighs, and
no wonder, they'm brave lads, surely; and there's a saddle-o'-mutton! I
rode twenty miles for mun yesterday, I did, over beyond Barnstaple; and
five year old, Mr. John, it is, if ever five years was; and not a tooth
to mun's head, for I looked to that; and smelt all the way home like any