Was there ever so clean a kitchen as Mary Haigh's, I wonder. Certainly there never was one oftener fettled. Jim's mother had few household gods, but those I verily believe she worshipped. The floor was sanded, the hearth blue-storied, the steel fender shone like burnished silver, you could see your face reflected with queer distortions in the brass knob of the oven door, the oaken press and settle and the deal chairs fairly sparkled with what Mary called elbow grease, the top of the little round three-legged table was white almost as driven snow. And as for Mary herself, sure never was a nattier little woman in all Yorkshire or Lancashire to boot. Nor a harder working. She was a tewer, as all the country-side would tell you, and always had been since she had been left a widow with little Jim still at the breast. She'd kept herself and Jim too, and anyone could see that Jim at all events hadn't wanted. Even yet she did some burling in the house, and many of the hands at Wrigley's paid her no less than a penny a week--bar missings--to heat their dinners for them, and in summer time she brewed for the behoof of the mill-girls a sweet and heady beverage called treacle-drink, of which the great merit was that it cost only a meg, in other words a half-penny, the quart, but which, Jim avowed, more in sorrow than in anger, possessed the fatal drawback that you got no forrader on a bucketful. We'd an extra spread for this morning's meal in honour of the Wakes. We started on the porridge. This Mary poured from the porringer into a large earthenware bowl, a dull russet colour on the outside, a highly glazed yellow on the inner. It stood in the centre of the table. Before Jim's seat was a basin of "whom-brewed," which he always took with his porridge. Mary and myself preferred buttermilk, which she fetched from Wrigley's big house at Holly Grove every churning day. We helped ourselves from the central dish by long leaden spoons, and I've always attributed the size of my mouth to the fact that in my tenderest years. I had to use these large-bowled spoons or "go bowt." Mary exhorted us to draw and eat heartily of the porridge she declared made by God a-purpose for growing lads. "You'll noan start without sayin' grace, Jim," she expostulated as Jim made a flourish over the steaming pottage with his spoon. "What for water-porridge?" asked Jim. "Aw've n'er said grace for porridge mother, an' aw'st noan begin. Ax Abel, he's noan partickler." "There's collops when yo'n etten th' porridge up, but not afore." "Oh, collops. Well, then, here goes: 'Sanctify these blessings--th' collops aw mean, noan th' watter porridge--to our use an' us to Thy service, Amen.' Nah, Abel, fair do's. Eh! aw wish it were th' Wakes six days a week, an' all th' year raand. Aw do like collop wi' haver bread an' plenty o' mustard."