one
occasion, "pork is the first on the list of indigestible articles of
food. It takes from six to eight hours for the gastric apparatus to
reduce its fibres. The stomach becomes overloaded--acidity is the
result; nightmares, pains, and innumerable ills are the consequence. The
very worst thing Mr. Iden could eat."

"Hum," growled the family doctor, a native of Woolhorton, when he heard
of this. "Hum!" low in his throat, like an irate bulldog. If in the
least excited, like most other country folk, he used the provincial
pronunciation. "Hum! A' have lived twenty years on pork. Let'n yet it!"

Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and did eat it six days out of
seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork;
sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied
it with pig-meat--good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat--such
as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the
"mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine
eater--a true Homeric diner--and to make it even, Iden junior sent in
the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about
the only amenity that survived between father and son.

The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we
all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs
fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of
it is best done on a gridiron--here's heresy! A gridiron is flat
blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific
fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.

But the "mouse,"--what was the "mouse?" The London butchers can't tell
me. It was a titbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk
are so ignorant.

Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled
the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.

He was up at five o'clock every morning of his life, pottering about the
great oven with his baker's man. In summer if it was fine he went out at
six for a walk in the Pines--the promenade of Woolhorton.

"If you wants to get well," old Dr. Butler used to say, "you go for a
walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver."

Before the air has been breathed over--inspired and re-inspired by human
crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh
from the spring; that was when it possessed its valu