Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/413

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IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA
405

the mutton. Sprinkle as before with herbs and spices. Cut up half a dozen apples very fine, also half a dozen onions, mix, and proceed to ram the onions and apples into every perceivable crevice. Take half a dozen pilchards, remove the bones, chop up and strew the whole pie with pilchards. Then fill up with clotted cream, till the pie-dish will hold no more. (For Cornish squab add, treated in like manner, a cormorant.) Proceed to lay a puff paste on the edge of the dish. Then insert a tablespoon and stir the contents, till your arm aches. Cover with crust or ornament it with leaves, brush it over with the yolk of an egg, and bake in a well-heated oven for one or one and a half hour, or longer, should the pie be very large (two in the case of a Cornish squab, and the cormorant very tough).

In one word, a squab pie is a scrap pie. So is the final chapter of a three-volume novel. It is made up, from the first word to the last, of scraps of all kinds, toothsome and the reverse.

Now let the reader observe—he has been already supplied with scraps. He has learned the result of Mr. Menaida's collecting men to assist him against the smugglers. Also of his expedition along with Judith to the rectory of St. Enodoc. Also he has heard the provisions of Captain Coppinger's will; also that this will was not contested. He has also heard of the recovery of the Captain's body from the burnt cottage.

Is not this a collection of scraps cut very small? But there are more, of a different character, with which this chapter will be made up, before the pie-crust closes over it with a nourishing " Finis" to ornament it.

Mr. Scantlebray had lost his wife, who had been an ailing woman for some years, and being a widower, cast about his eyes for a second wife, after the way of widowers. There was not the excuse of a young family needing a prudent housewife to manage the children, for Mr. Scantlebray had only one daughter, who had been allotted by her father and by popular opinion to Captain Coppinger, but had failed to secure him. Mr. Scantlebray, though an active man, had not amassed much money, and if he could add to his comforts, provide himself with good eating and good drinking, by marrying a woman with money, he was not averse to so doing. Now, Mr. Scantlebray had lent a ready ear