not have.

But when the bailiff and the sexton sat at cards, and Toad came in to
lay the table-cloth, they were like to have rolled off their chairs.
Such a sight they had never seen before. Toad had rigged herself up with
all manner of parti-coloured 'kerchiefs, and trimmed her hairy poll with
blue and yellow and green ribbons till it looked like a cart-horse's
tail. But they said nothing, for the sake of the general dealer, who
thought she looked so smart, and was calling her in continually.

And they were forced to confess that the wench spared neither meat nor
ale nor brandy. And on the third evening, when they got so drunk that
they lay there like logs, she carried them off to bed as if they were
sucking babes.

And so it went on, with feasting and entertaining, right up to the
twentieth day after Christmas Day, and beyond it.

And that wench Toad used to smirk and stare about the room; and whenever
they didn't laugh or jest enough with her, she would plant herself right
in the middle of the floor, and turn herself about in all her finery to
attract notice, and say, "It's me!"

And when the guests left the house they must needs admit that the
general dealer was right when he said that such serving-maids were not
to be picked up every day.

But those folks who went a-fishing for the general dealer, and had their
provisions put up for them beforehand, were not slow to mark that Toad
had the control of the shop and stores likewise.

So it happened as might only have been expected. Their provisions ran
short, and they had to return home just as the cod was biting best,
while all the other fishermen sailed further out and made first-rate
hauls.

The general dealer was like to have had apoplexy on the day that he saw
his boats lying empty by the bridge in the height of the fishing season.
His men came up in a body to the shop, headed by their eldest foreman,
and laid a complaint before him.

The food that had been packed into their boxes and baskets, they said,
couldn't be called human food at all. The _lefser_ were so hard, they
said, that it was munch munch all day; there was only rancid fat on
them, with scarcely a glimpse of bacon; and as for the cured shoulders
of mutton, one had scarcely shaved off a thin slice when one scraped
against the bare bone.

Up into the store-room went the general dealer like a shot.

But as for Toad, she smote her hands above her head, and said that it
was as much as he, th