“Hear that?” said Mrs. Pottage. “That blessed bird understands every word I say. Don’t you, my beauty? Now come along, drink up your soup, and do eat a little bit of the nice cold supper I’ve put out for you.” While her lodgers were enjoying the cold roast beef, Mrs. Pottage examined the purchases made for Letizia’s stocking. “Oh, dear, how they do get things up nowadays!” she exclaimed, holding at admiring arm’s length the monkey-on-a-stick. “Lifelike, isn’t it? You’ll want an orange and an apple, don’t forget. And I wouldn’t put in too many lollipops if I was you, or she won’t be able to eat any turkey. I got you a lovely little turkey. Nine pounds. Well, you don’t want to sit down to an elephant. I remember one Christmas I invited my sister to come up from Essex, and I thought she’d appreciate some turkey, so I told the fishmonger to send in a really nice dainty little one. Well, by mistake his boy brought round one that weighed thirty-two pounds and which had won the prize for the biggest turkey in Greenwich that year. In fact, it come round to me with a red and white rosette stuck in its how-d’ye-do as big as a sunflower. Well, it didn’t arrive till past eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and I was down at the ‘Nelson’s Head’ with my sister till closing time, and there it was waiting for us when we got back, tied onto the knocker. It gave me a bit of a start, because I’d had one or two for old sake’s sake, and I thought for the minute some pore fellow had gone and suicided himself on my front door. Well, there was nothing to be done but cook it, and my sister’s a small-made woman, and when we sat down to dinner with that turkey between us she might have been sitting one side of St. Paul’s and me the other. I give you my word that turkey lasted me for weeks. Well, the wish-bone was as big as a church window, and I could have hung my washing out on the drumsticks. It _was_ a bird. Oh, dear, oh, dear! Well, I know when I threw the head out to the cat the pore beast had convulsions in the backyard, and as for the parson’s nose, well, as I said to my sister, the parson as had a nose like that must have been a Jewish rabbit. What a set out it was, to be sure! And my turkey which I ought to have had was sent up to a large family gathering in the Shooter’s Hill Road, and half the party never tasted turkey at all that Christmas.” Mrs. Pottage continued in a strain of jovial reminiscence until her lodgers had finished supper, after which she wanted to accompany them upstairs to their room that she might help in the filling of Letizia’s stocking. “The fact is,” she whispered hoarsely, “I put that stocking of mine out, because I’d bought a few odds and ends for her myself.”