roast beef on his plate, and
complaining that it is very tough; Mr. Donne says the beer is flat. Ay,
that is the worst of it: if they would only be civil Mrs. Gale wouldn't
mind it so much, if they would only seem satisfied with what they get
she wouldn't care; but "these young parsons is so high and so scornful,
they set everybody beneath their 'fit.' They treat her with less than
civility, just because she doesn't keep a servant, but does the work of
the house herself, as her mother did afore her; then they are always
speaking against Yorkshire ways and Yorkshire folk," and by that very
token Mrs. Gale does not believe one of them to be a real gentleman, or
come of gentle kin. "The old parsons is worth the whole lump of college
lads; they know what belongs to good manners, and is kind to high and
low."

"More bread!" cries Mr. Malone, in a tone which, though prolonged but to
utter two syllables, proclaims him at once a native of the land of
shamrocks and potatoes. Mrs. Gale hates Mr. Malone more than either of
the other two; but she fears him also, for he is a tall, strongly-built
personage, with real Irish legs and arms, and a face as genuinely
national--not the Milesian face, not Daniel O'Connell's style, but the
high-featured, North-American-Indian sort of visage, which belongs to a
certain class of the Irish gentry, and has a petrified and proud look,
better suited to the owner of an estate of slaves than to the landlord
of a free peasantry. Mr. Malone's father termed himself a gentleman: he
was poor and in debt, and besottedly arrogant; and his son was like him.

Mrs. Gale offered the loaf.

"Cut it, woman," said her guest; and the "woman" cut it accordingly. Had
she followed her inclinations, she would have cut the parson also; her
Yorkshire soul revolted absolutely from his manner of command.

The curates had good appetites, and though the beef was "tough," they
ate a great deal of it. They swallowed, too, a tolerable allowance of
the "flat beer," while a dish of Yorkshire pudding, and two tureens of
vegetables, disappeared like leaves before locusts. The cheese, too,
received distinguished marks of their attention; and a "spice-cake,"
which followed by way of dessert, vanished like a vision, and was no
more found. Its elegy was chanted in the kitchen by Abraham, Mrs. Gale's
son and heir, a youth of six summers; he had reckoned upon the reversion
thereof, and when his mother brought down the empty platter, h