Spring in a Shropshire Abbey. Gaskell Catherine Henrietta Milnes

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СКАЧАТЬ faire.” Then he told me in confidence that it was not in vain that his mother had been over thirty years gouvernante in the household of Madame la Princesse de P – . She knew everything, he asserted, “mais tous les secrets de ménage.”

      I bowed my head, and happily had the tact not to press for an explanation, for I knew Auguste’s recipes were real secrets, and as jealously guarded as those of any War Office in Europe.

      Bess clapped her hands. “Hals will be pleased,” she said. “Because now old Fräulein need not be cross, and there will be no punishments.”

      Auguste bowed solemnly. “Madame is satisfied,” he said, and retired like a beneficent fairy god-mother into the depth of his culinary kingdom.

      The difference between our people and the Latin races is great. I have often noticed that Frenchmen or Italians are delighted to know any housewifely trick or wile – and that ignorance of all other departments but their own does not, in their eyes, constitute intrinsic merit. Foreigners seldom say, “That was not my business, sir,” or “not my department.” Whereas, in every well-constituted English domestic mind, “not my business,” or “not my work” is a creed to be cherished firmly, whatever else dissolves or changes, and is treated as the bulwark of English domestic life.

      Before I left the kitchen door I asked for a saucer of chopped egg, a slice of sponge cake, a roast potato, and half an apple for the inhabitants of my aviary. Tramp and Tartar started barking furiously, in a noisy inconsequent way; and off Bess and I went armed with dainties. Mouse followed gravely, but not without misgivings, for she took no interest in birds, and felt, I am sure, that they enjoyed far too much consideration from me. Bess and I descended the steps which led down from the garden to the field, but held on tightly to the rails, for it was slippery.

      “Mummie,” cried out Bess, “mind, for it is slippery all over, like walking over a glass door.” However, we neither of us fell, and reached the aviary door in safety. Then we saw rather a wonderful sight: some forty canaries of all colours – green, cinnamon, jonquil, clear and mealy, yellow, spotted and flaked, were all to be found there. Poor little dears! They were making the most of the wintry gleams of sunshine, and some of them looked rather hunched up and puffy from the cold. They have a thatched shed, and in front, facing due south, a long flight of some twenty feet for exercise, beneath fine wire netting. But their playground was cold, as Bess said. As we entered the cage, they flew round us with cries of joy. Canaries are very easily tamed, and they perched on the saucer containing the food. They ate greedily the chopped egg, and pecked at the sponge cake and apple. Bess ran into their “bedroom” as she calls it, and squeezed on “their dressing table” the “heart” of a big potato cooked “in his jacket.” One cock was singing sweetly. Burbidge must have given them water only a few minutes before, for it was still tepid in the dish, and some were drinking with avidity. We dropped a few drops of sherry into the water to act as a cordial, from a flask that Burbidge had got stowed away in a little box of what he calls “extras,” and I added a couple of rusty nails from the same store. I noted that my dear old cock canary, “Bourton Boy,” that I have had some ten years and known from an egg, looked a little mopish – what Bess calls “fat and fluffy.” I watched him in silence, and tried to discover what it was he lacked. There was an ample supply of egg, apple, and of potato, not to speak of canary, rape, and hemp seed, but he fluttered round and at last pecked violently at a crystal button on my coat; then I knew what he was after, and called out “sugar.” Bess echoed the cry, and darted off like a little fairy for some, finely pounded, in a scrap of paper from kind Auguste, who adores “toutes les bêtes de madame.” We had discovered rightly what it was that the Bourton Boy was in need of. He uttered a note of joy, and fell upon the sugar with a right good will directly we had placed it in the cage, whilst Bess watched him.

BOURTON BOY’S REQUEST

      “Why don’t you give him lettuce, too? Auguste offered me some salad,” she asked.

      “It is not good for canaries till the spring,” I replied. Then I went to the end of the shed to see if there was plenty of fat bacon hanging up – the birds’ cod liver oil, as old Nana calls it. I inspected a piece some three inches long and two wide. It was pecked all over by voracious little beaks, and was quite thin in places. Fat bacon is an excellent adjunct to an aviary, and is one of the best means of keeping birds in health, and of special value to hens during the nesting season. In winter, also, it seems to be very nourishing, and to give great gloss and lustre to their plumage. After seeing that their larder was well supplied, I turned to their baking-tin, full of red sand and very fine oyster grit. It is really astonishing, what an amount of grit all birds require to keep them in health. I poked up the contents of the tin with my walking-stick. It was amusing to watch the birds. In a moment all had left the seed, egg, or potato, and were engaged in picking up the freshly turned sand. A few months ago I was obliged to have the floor of the aviary firmly cemented down, as otherwise I found that mice burrowed from underneath and effected an entrance, and then attacked my pets. The cement in a few days hardened, and now is like a rock, and I am glad to say inroads from the furry little barbarians have become impossible.

      “My children of light,” as I call them, having been visited, I turned away and escaped with Bess out of the aviary, but not without great care, and having resource to some stratagems, for my little feathered friends all followed me closely, curious, and always hoping for fresh delights. At a given signal, Bess slipped under my arm, and we closed the door like lightning behind us.

      As we mounted the stairs, we saw the old gardener Burbidge waiting for us at the top. He looked like a picture of Old Time, with his grey hair, his worn brown overcoat, his long grey beard, and behind all, the background of snow.

      “They are all well,” I called out to him, “in spite of the cold.”

      “They was matted up yesterday,” answered the old man, pointing downwards to my pets. Then he went on to say how he and the gardeners strengthened the artificial hedge on the east side, by adding fir branches and some mats, “for it was fit to blow their feathers out, that mortal sharp was the eastwinder;” and Burbidge looked at my pets with indulgent pity, and added, “They be nesh folks, be canaries, for all they write about them.” Then he suspected Bess of giving them forbidden food. “They mustn’t have no green food. It be as bad for ’em as spring showers be for sucking gulleys” (goslings), he added, “and that be certain death.”

      “But I haven’t given them anything not allowed,” stammered out Bess, indignantly; “mama and I have only given them what we always do.”

      “Ah!” said Burbidge, softening, “that won’t be no hurt then; and as to potato and apple, they be the best quill revivers out, come winter. But what sort of apple was it?”

      I replied that the apple was a “Blenheim Orange” and no American.

“NO NEED OF FOREIGN STUFF”

      “No need of foreign stuff in Shropshire,” answered Burbidge, proudly. “Our late apples are as sound as if they were only fruited yesterday.”

      Then I told him that the potato was one of the same sort that I had last night at dinner – floury, sweet and mealy.

      “Then I’ll be bound,” he replied, “you had an Up-to-Dater, or may be a Sutton’s Abundance; they be both sound as a sovereign, real gold all through. No blotches or specks in they. We had four roods of both on the farm. Fresh land, no manure and a dusty summer, and tatters will take care of theirselves; but come a wet year, a field potato is worth two in a garden, although I says it as shouldn’t, but truth is truth, although you have to look up a black chimney to find it, as folks say.”

      Then old Burbidge went on to tell me how “Potatoes be right house wenches in a garden, or same as clouts to floors; but don’t you go to takin’ ’em from their nature too early, for when the tops bleed the tubers will never be fit for squire’s СКАЧАТЬ