As the Christmas season approached Mr. Boult was inspired with an idea which was productive of good commercial results, but was the cause of added extreme discomfort to them all. Mrs. Day, he ordained, was not only to advertise home-made mincemeat, but to make the mincemeat at home, and of a quality not procurable in shops. The housewives of Brockenham made their own mincemeat because the article on the market was not palatable, the tyrant of the family declared. Every one of them would be glad to be saved trouble. Then, let Mrs. Day, for whom he had procured an excellent receipt, make it for them. The sale would be enormous. So they advertised the precious stuff from the beginning of December; and from a fortnight before this time to the end of the second week in January, the little family worked at stoning raisins (there were no machines to make the task easy then), chopping almonds and suet and apples and orange peel, late into the night, and sometimes on into the early hours of the morning. For the sale, as predicted, was great. It taxed the powers of the women to their utmost to keep up the supply. Orders poured in, orders were repeated; customers called to assure Mrs. Day that while she lived to do it for them they would never be bothered to make the stuff again. Others came with the intention to wheedle the receipt from the shop-woman. Such was the unbusiness-like disposition of the poor creature, she would at once have surrendered it, had the prescription been hers to give. But George Boult, knowing with whom he had to deal, had laid an embargo on the property. It was during the stress of that first Christmas in Bridge Street that the relations between the Days and their boarder, the Manchester man, hitherto somewhat strained and distant, became easy and familiar. Beside the comfortable chair in the chimney corner which had been apportioned him, a small table was drawn up which held, always ready to his use, his tobacco jar, his pipe, his book, his papers. To this, the evening meal which he shared with the family over, he would retire, preferring silence and, generally pretended, absorption in his book to the obtrusion of his conversation on the widow and her daughters. But in the harassment of the time of mincemeat the lodger's shyness evaporated or his reserve broke down. He could not see women, dropping with sleep and weariness, working themselves half to death over their hated tasks while he sat at ease with his pipe and his newspaper. "Why should you ladies spend your evenings in the kitchen?" he asked. "It is comfortabler in here. Chop your plums and grate your nutmegs and things here. You won't disturb me." Bessie at once demurred. "We will keep our sitting-room, at least, free of the shop, thank you," she said. "If Mr. Gibbon doesn't like being in here alone, mayn't he bring his pipe and see us chop in the kitchen," Franky suggested.