as working serious
effects upon the contents of his meal-chest. With a keenly whetted
appetite, and in vigorous health, I was eating a great deal of bread;
and, after a good deal of grumbling, he at length laid it down as law
that I should restrict myself for the future to two cakes per week. I at
once agreed; but the general barrack, to whose ears some of my master's
remonstrances had found their way, was dissatisfied; and it would
probably have overturned in conclave our agreement, and punished the old
man, my master, for the niggardly stringency of his terms, had I not
craved, by way of special favour, to be permitted to give them a week's
trial. One evening early in the week, when the old man had gone out, I
mixed up the better part of a peck of meal in a pot, and placing two of
the larger chests together in the same plane, kneaded it out into an
enormous cake, at least equal in area to an ordinary-sized Newcastle
grindstone. I then cut it up into about twenty pieces, and, forming a
vast semicircle of stones round the fire, raised the pieces to the heat
in a continuous row, some five or six feet in length. I had ample and
ready assistance vouchsafed me in the "firing"--half the barrack were
engaged in the work--when my master entered, and after scanning our
employment in utter astonishment--now glancing at the ring of meal which
still remained on the united chests, to testify to the huge proportions
of the disparted bannock, and now at the cones, squares, rhombs, and
trapeziums of cake that hardened to the heat in front of the fire, he
abruptly asked--"What's this, laddie?--are ye baking for a wadding?"
"Just baking one of the two cakes, master," I replied; "I don't think
we'll need the other one before Saturday night." A roar of laughter from
every corner of the barrack precluded reply; and in the laughter, after
an embarrassed pause, the poor man had the good sense to join. And
during the rest of the season I baked as often and as much as I pleased.
It is, I believe, Goldsmith who remarks, that "wit generally succeeds
more from being happily addressed, than from its native poignancy," and
that "a jest calculated to spread at a gaming table, may be received
with perfect indifference should it happen to drop in a mackerel-boat."
On Goldsmith's principle, the joke of what was termed, from the
well-known fairy tale, "the big bannock wi' the Malison," could have
perhaps succeeded in only a masons' barrack; but never ther