"Tell ye what it is, George," said Tom Clarke, the biggest ducker in the village, as he sat smoking one evening in the newly built club in the main street, "I be altogether flustered along o' them new fancies of the Squire, I be. What be rabbits, hey, man? Can ye tell me that, now? Ye be oop at the Manor all day, along o' the Squire hisself, so ye ought to know for sure."
The handy man shook his head dumbly, which was his usual form of reply, and the one that his hearers generally preferred; and Tom Clarke continued his ruminations for the benefit of any of the members present who might be inclined to listen to him.
"Rabbits beats me altogether, I be bound to own. They bain't poultry, and they bain't butcher's meat neither. What be they, anyhow? The Squire be a proper kind gentleman for sure, but when he takes up with them okkard new fancies what no one can't explain, it be proper hard to know how to treat 'un. Why, George man, when the parson was readin' of the Litany, Sunday past, and come to the 'kindly fruits of the earth,' I thinks to myself, 'that's rabbits, that is,' and I shuts my mouth tight, I does! And me what's never missed sayin' and singin' all the prayer-book allows 'un to do, this forty year that I've sat in the choir up agin poor Jack Priest's tablet. 'T ain't as though I be an unreligious body what sings an' don't pray, as I've known some do; but there's never a Amen that I don't take part in, and there bain't a trap in the service as can catch me now, allays allowin' for the reply to the tenth commandment what were put in by the devil or the chapel people, and caught on by the parsons accidental, so to speak. So you see how a man be upset all along o' them beasts, if ye can call a thing a beast what eats like string."
Mrs. Tom Clarke, in spite of the cookery lectures that had been given in the Club on Wednesday evenings, by an expert from London, who had evolved strange dishes from herring heads and mutton bones with the aid of a patent portable stove, still preferred to cook her husband's food in her own way, and this generally consisted in putting it into a saucepan from which the duck's food had just been extracted,--a process which had the effect of making everything taste alike; so it was certainly probable that the Squire's rabbit had not had a fair chance in that cottage, at all events.