hall I buy?" said he; "I'm uncommon hungry."

"I say," said East, stopping to look at him and rest his leg, "you're a
trump, Brown. I'll do the same by you next half. Let's have a pound of
sausages, then; that's the best grub for tea I know of."

"Very well," said Tom, as pleased as possible; "where do they sell
them?"

"Oh, over here, just opposite;" and they crossed the street and walked
into the cleanest little front room of a small house, half parlour, half
shop, and bought a pound of most particular sausages; East talking
pleasantly to Mrs. Porter while she put them in paper, and Tom doing the
paying part.

From Porter's they adjourned to Sally Harrowell's, where they found a
lot of School-house boys waiting for the roast potatoes, and relating
their own exploits in the day's match at the top of their voices. The
street opened at once into Sally's kitchen, a low, brick-floored room,
with large recess for fire, and chimney-corner seats. Poor little Sally,
the most good-natured and much enduring of womankind, was bustling about
with a napkin in her hand, from her own oven to those of the neighbours'
cottages, up the yard at the back of the house. Stumps, her husband, a
short, easy-going shoemaker, with a beery humorous eye and ponderous
calves, who lived mostly on his wife's earnings, stood in a corner of
the room, exchanging shots of the roughest description of repartee with
every boy in turn. "Stumps, you lout, you've had too much beer again
to-day." "'Twasn't of your paying for, then."--"Stumps's calves are
running down into his ankles, they want to get to grass." "Better be
doing that, than gone altogether like yours," &c. &c. Very poor stuff it
was, but it served to make time pass; and every now and then Sally
arrived in the middle with a smoking tin of potatoes, which were cleared
off in a few seconds, each boy as he seized his lot running oft to the
house with "Put me down two-penn'orth, Sally;" "Put down three-penn'orth
between me and Davis," &c. How she ever kept the accounts so straight as
she did, in her head and on her slate, was a perfect wonder.

East and Tom got served at last, and started back for the School-house
just as the locking-up bell began to ring; East on the way recounting
the life and adventures of Stumps, who was a character. Amongst his
other small avocations, he was the hind carrier of a sedan-chair, the
last of its race, in which the Rugby ladies still went out to tea, and
in which