“I have fancied,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “a deal table set three times every day under a beautiful yew-tree in a far country. The yew-tree would be in a pasture where cattle are grazing, and always when I sat eating at the deal table the cows would stand about watching me. Sometimes on the deal table there would be brown bread and honey; sometimes there would be salt and cantaloupe; sometimes there would be lettuce with vinegar and pepper and oil; sometimes there would be whole-wheat bread and curds and cream in a brown earthen dish; sometimes there would be walnuts and figs; sometimes there would be two little broiled fish; sometimes there would be peaches; sometimes there would be flat white biscuits and squares of brown fudge; sometimes there would be bread and cheese; sometimes there would be olives and Scotch bannocks; sometimes there would be a blue delft pot of chocolate and an egg; sometimes there would be tea and scones; sometimes there would be plum-cake; sometimes there would be bread and radishes; sometimes there would be wine and olives; sometimes there would be a strawberry tart. “I should live over the hill from the yew-tree, and I should come there to eat at seven o’clock in the morning, and at one in the afternoon, and at seven in the evening. And meanwhile I should be busy at some work so that my eating would be as if I had earned it.” “What sort of work would you do?” I asked. “I might wash fine bits of lace,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “and lay them out upon a sunny grass-plot to bleach and dry. Or I might pick berries and take them to market. Or I might sit in a doorway making baskets--I should make beautiful little baskets. Or I might care for a small garden, or a flock of geese--to feed them with grains and keep them from straying away. ‘So many hours must I tend my flock, so many hours must I sport myself, so many hours must I contemplate’--I should do all these things while tending my flock, and I should tend my flock well. I should do all my work well, so that the food on the deal table, under the yew-tree, would taste as if it had been earned.