me bread-sauce handed to him, extracted a
great "dollop" on the top of his knife, tasted it, and said, "Don't chuse
none." There was the other who remarked of a particular pudding, that he
"could rise in the night-time and eat it"; and there was the third, who,
supposing he should get but one plate, shovelled his fish-bones under the
table. There was the boy in Monk Soham school who, asked to define an
earthquake, said, "It is when the 'arth shug itself, and swallow up the
'arth"; and there was his schoolmate, who said that "America was
discovered by British Columbia." There was old Mullinger of Earl Soham,
who thought it "wrong of fooks to go up in a ballune, as that fare {33}
so bumptious to the Almighty." There was the actual balloon, which had
gone up somewhere in the West of England, and which came down in (I
think) the neighbouring parish of Bedfield. As it floated over Monk
Soham, the aeronaut shouted, "Where am I?" to some harvesters, who,
standing in a row, their forefingers pointed at him, shouted back,
"Yeou're in a ballune, bor." There was old X., who, whenever my father
visited him, would grumble, talk scandal, and abuse all his neighbours,
always, however, winding up piously with "But 'tis well." There was the
boy whom my father put in the stocks, but who escaped by unlacing his
"high-lows," and so withdrawing his feet. There was the clergyman,
preaching in a strange church, who asked to have a glass of water in the
pulpit, and who, after the sermon, remarked to the clerk in the vestry,
"That might have been gin-and-water, John, for all the people could
tell." And, taking the duty again there next Sunday, he found to his
horror it _was_ gin-and-water: "I took the hint, sir--I took the hint,"
quoth John, from the clerk's desk below. There was the Monk Soham woman
who, when she got a letter from her son in Hull, told the curate that
"that did give me a tarn at fust, for I thought that come from the hot
place." There was another Monk Soham woman who told my sister one day
that she had been reading in the Bible "about that there gal Haggar," and
who, after discussing the story of Hagar, went on, "When that gal grew up
she went and preached to some fooks in a city that were livin' bad
lives." My sister did not know about this, so inquired where she had
found it, and she turned to the Book of the Prophet Haggai--Hagar and
Haggai to her were one and the same. There was the manufacturer of
artificial ma