I didn't know what to do, whether to laugh or cry; and I'm sure I must have looked like a madman as I tore through the streets, and rushed upstairs into our room, when the first thing I did was to scrape up every bit of coal at the bottom of the cupboard and put it a-top of the fire. "Lay the cloth, my lass," I says, seizing a dish; "and, Lord bless you, look alive!" The children stared, and then laughed and clapped their hands, while I rushed out to the cook's shop in the lane, looking like a wolf. There was a roast goose just up, and cissing away in the big pewter dish all amongst the gravy, with the stuffing a smelling that rich, it was enough to drive you mad. Just as I slipped into the door, the waiter--red-nosed chap--with a dirty white wisp of a handkercher round his neck, looking like a seedy undertaker--the waiter says: "Two goose--apple sauce--and taters;" and the master sticks his fork into the buzzum, and makes a cut as sent the stuffing all out of a gush. "Hold hard," I says, "that's mine;" and ketching hold of one leg, before he knew what I was up to, it was on my dish. "Now then, ladle on that gravy," I says, "and let's have the setrers;" and saying that, I dabs a sovrin down on the edge of the pewter. I think they were going to send out for a policeman, but the sight of that little bit of metal settled it, and five minutes after I was carrying the change--not much of it neither--the goose under a cover, and the waiter following behind with a tray, with vegetables, sauce, and aside the great wedge of pudding, a pot of half-and-half. When the waiter had gone out of the room, and the little ones were hooraying and tapping with their knives, I got to the top of the table, the wife went to the bottom, and I began to say grace, when our eyes met, she ran to me, and then for a good ten minutes she was a sobbing in my arms; while I--there; that's private, and I think I've confessed enough. There; I don't care whose it was, or where it was, all I know is this, that there wasn't such a dinner eaten or enjoyed anywhere that day throughout the length and breadth of our old country; and though sometimes it was hard to see where I stuck the fork, or cut with the knife, I was smiling all the time. As for the wife, she would keep breaking down till I shouted at her, when she went at it and helped me keep the young ones going; and at last of all I'd have taken a shilling for what was left of the goose, and whoever bought it wouldn't have been the best off in the bargain. The very next week I was took on the London, Highshare, and Ploughshare railway, and that through the gent who got me discharged from the Great Central, which happened this way.