delicious shiny brown, their soft insides soaked through and
through with gravy. Bake is a meal in itself. Pudding thereafter is a
work of supererogation--almost an impertinence.

Mrs Widger's cookery, though sometimes a little greasy for one who does
no great amount of manual labour and undergoes no excessive exposure,
is far from bad.

[Sidenote: _FOOD_]

Food reformers; patrons of cookery schools where they try, happily in
vain, to teach the pupils to prepare dishes no working man would
adventure on; physical degenerates who fear that unless the working man
imitates them, he will become as degenerate as they are, and quite
unfit to do the world's rough work--forget that whereas they have only
one staple food, if that, namely bread, the poor man has several staple
dishes which he likes so well that he is loth to touch any other.

One day we did have at my suggestion a rather fanciful supper. Tony
tasted, ate, and cleared the dish. Then he asked: "An't 'ee got nort to
make a meal on, Missis? no cold meat nor spuds?" He believes in the
theory that good digestion waits on appetite rather than on digestible
or pre-digested foods; that the meal which makes a man's mouth water is
the best to eat; and that solid foods give solid strength. And if the
same dish can make his mouth water nearly every day in the week, how
much more fortunate is he than fickle gourmets!

When I first came here, I used periodically to run after the
flesh-pots. I used to sneak off to tea at a confectioner's. Now I
seldom feed out of house--simply because I don't want to. We start the
day about sunrise with biscuits and a cup of tea which I make and take
up myself. (Mam Widger and Tony look so jolly in bed, her indoor
complexion and white nightgown beside his blue-check shirt and
magnificently tanned face, that I've dubbed them 'The Babes in the
Wood.') For breakfast, we have fried mackerel or herrings, when they
are in season; otherwise various mixtures of tough bacon and perhaps
eggs (children half an egg each) and bubble and squeak.[14] Sometimes
the children prefer kettle-broth,[15] but they never fail to clamour for
'jam zide plaate.' Bake, hot or cold, and occasionally (mainly for me,
I think) a plain pudding, or on highdays a pie, make up the dinner that
is partaken of by all. But before the pudding is eaten, Tony and myself
are already looking round to see that the kettle is on a hot part of
the fire, and when the children are gone off t