Now into the details of that great revel I must not enter. The meal had been put off an hour beyond our usual time, which was enough of itself to put an edge on appetites kept in good fettle by daily labour, frugal fare, cleanly lives, and mountain air. So that I fear we listened with little patience and not over-much attention to the long, long grace my father must needs offer before we were at liberty to fall to. I daresay there are people who wonder at those who take a delight in a hearty feed. I expect these are the folk who all their lives have always had more than enough to eat. We were not in that case--far otherwise. The fare at Pole Moor was ample enough, but ever of the plainest, porridge and buttermilk, buttermilk and porridge, bacon and pork, pork and bacon, with haver bread--Ruth had as neat a turn of the wrist for swishing the meal and water on to a bakestone as ever you saw--butcher's meat and white bread perhaps once a week, and now and then a dish of tea. For puddings and pies we fell back on fruit of our own growing, rhubarb and gooseberries mainly. Now I've often reflected--there's nothing like a good dinner for inducing pious meditation--that it is a sure proof of the infinite goodness and wisdom of the great Architect of the universe that the best and most wholesome and necessary things are ever the most abundant and cheapest, and accessible to all God's creatures. What, for instance, is cheaper than cold water? And what water is to man, inside and outside, the stupid creature never realises till he is compelled at times to do without. What fruit of the earth can a man turn to with such unfailing relish as the potato that any cottager can grow on a rough patch of ground, what vegetable more medicinal than the cabbage, what fruit more toothsome than rhubarb when the shoots are yet tender, or the gooseberry whilst still green and tart. I suppose your "gret fo'k," as Mary called the quality, set much store on their grapes, and pines, and peaches, and other precious fruits I don't even know the names of, but old Dr. Dean--and a better doctor never trod--would often say that a man would sooner stall of grapes, and pines, and peaches, and all such fallalls, than he would of rhubarb and gooseberries, and that for keeping a man's innards in order those luxuries of the rich were not to be mentioned in the same week with the hardy produce of the cottage garden. But, there, all these sage thoughts were very far from my head as I sat next to Miriam at table, and, what time I was not kept busy passing cups and plates, did my level best to eat up to the standard Jim had set for himself and confided to me for my own guidance. We had been taught in our early days that company manners forbade the partaking twice of the same dish, and Jim had carefully modelled his slow and steady progress through the viands on that precept. So his bill of fare, to which he heroically adhered, was something like this:--