“You dear,” she said. “I am so glad we have got you at last.” Her coif looked as if she had slept in it, and her plump hands were by no means over clean. She was a stumpy, beaming little woman, moist with good living. Her skin worked so freely, and in such prosperous folds, it might have made a dyspeptic sigh with envy. I felt at home with her directly. “There, dear,” she said, “you have brought us many good things in your time, but none so good as yourself; and now we take you in pledge of better.” It may have been meant as a little sly spiritual reflection, but she smacked her ripe lips over it as if she already tasted in me, as madam’s direct protégée, a very plethora of venison and larded fowls. For many years, I believe, these good little women had been secretly looking forward to the term of my novitiate as their gastronomic millennium. I could laugh, I declare, with remorse to think how the dear pink little pigs were defrauded. I had been delivered without directions, but with a surly intimation that madam would call on the morrow. It was not my business to enlighten anyone; and so I enjoyed the best of my present favour. She trotted me out by and by to see her asparagus and strawberry beds, fat in promise, though tucked now and slumbering under their autumn blankets of manure; her hives; her mushroom pits; her stewpond thick with fat carps stuffed up to the neck and something her own shape; her pigeon cotes and rabbit hutches. There was an odd family likeness, a general assimilation to the neckless, apoplectic type amongst them all--Sisters, animals, and vegetables. Perpetual invocation, it was evident, had an obliterating effect on the individual. I shifted my own dimpled shoulders. How long would they be rounding to the contour of these squat little vessels? I thought with a certain terror of my admirable digestion, and determined as long as I remained here to live sparely. What if, like the wolf in the fable, I were to eat so many fat pancakes that I could not escape through the hole in the wall again!