“I thought she meant what she said,” replied Susan, “that she would come here at six o’clock.” “Ay, that’s as plain as a pike-staff,” said Barbara; “but what else did she mean, think you? People, you know, don’t always mean exactly, downright, neither more nor less than what they say.” “Not always,” said Susan, with an arch smile, which convinced Barbara that she was not quite a simpleton. “_Not Always_,” repeated Barbara colouring,—“oh, then I suppose you have some guess at what Miss Somers meant.” “No,” said Susan, “I was not thinking about Miss Somers, when I said not always.” “How nice that broth does look,” resumed Barbara, after a pause. Susan had now poured the broth into a basin, and as she strewed over it the bright orange marigolds, it looked very tempting. She tasted it, and added now a little salt, and now a little more, till she thought it was just to her mother’s taste. “Oh! _I_ must taste it,” said Bab, taking the basin up greedily. “Won’t you take a spoon?” said Susan, trembling at the large mouthfuls which Barbara sucked up with a terrible noise. “Take a spoonful, indeed!” exclaimed Barbara, setting down the basin in high anger. “The next time I taste your broth you shall affront me, if you dare! The next time I set my foot in this house, you shall be as saucy to me as you please.” And she flounced out of the house, repeating “_Take a spoon_, _pig_, was what you meant to say.” Susan stood in amazement at the beginning of this speech; but the concluding words explained to her the mystery. Some years before this time, when Susan was a very little girl, and could scarcely speak plain, as she was eating a basin of bread and milk for her supper at the cottage door, a great pig came up, and put his nose into the basin. Susan was willing that the pig should have some share of the bread and milk; but as she ate with a spoon and he with his large mouth, she presently discovered that he was likely to have more than his share; and in a simple tone of expostulation she said to him, “Take a _poon_, pig.” {77} The saying become proverbial in the village. Susan’s little companions repeated it, and applied it upon many occasions, whenever anyone claimed more than his share of anything good. Barbara, who was then not Miss Barbara, but plain Bab, and who had played with all the poor children in the neighbourhood, was often reproved in her unjust methods of division by Susan’s proverb. Susan, as she grew up, forgot the childish saying; but the remembrance of it rankled in Barbara’s mind, and it was to this that she suspected Susan had alluded, when she recommended a spoon to her, whilst she was swallowing the basin of broth.