"He always yells like that at the sight of tramps or stray people about," apologised the cook. "He's better than a watch-dog. Hold your tongue, you baste; don't you know your misthress when you see her?" "Rafferty caught him in the park," said Phyl, "and cut his tongue with a sixpence so as to make him able to speak." They left the kitchen and came into the yard. A big tin can of refuse was standing by the kitchen door, and on top of all sorts of rubbish, potato peelings, cabbage stalks and so forth, lay the carcass of a boiled fowl. It was the fowl they had dined off the night before and it lay there just as it had gone from the table, that is to say, minus both wings and the greater part of the breast, but with the legs intact. Pinckney stared at this sinful sight. Then he pointed to it. "What's that doing there?" he asked. "Waitin' to be took away be the stable boy, sor," replied the cook, who had followed them to the door. "All the rubbish is took away in that ould can every mornin'." "Good God!" said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or covering of any sort, before. "Haven't you any poor people about here?" he asked. "Hapes, sor." Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the position of a guest. He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom, was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night before. "The servants won't eat chicken," said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. "They won't eat game either--and they throw things away if they don't like them--of course, it's wasteful, but they _do_ give things to the poor. Lots of poor people come here, every day nearly, but they don't care for scraps--you see, it _is_ insulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought to know better than to offer them the leavings." "Cheek!" "Well, I don't know," said Phyl. "We've done it for hundreds of years."