United States or Indonesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


When a mop sees me coming now it dances a hornpipe, and I can't look a dish-rag in the face. All I see in my dreams is potato-parings and meat-rinds. I've got dish- water in my veins, and the whole universe looks greasy to me. Naturally it was my luck to pick the slowest ship in the harbor. We lay three weeks in the ice, that's all, and nobody worked but me and the sea-gulls."

"There's no objection that I know of," said Mrs Murchison, shaking her apron free of stray potato-parings, "but you won't get money for the lacrosse match or anything else from your father today, I can assure you. They didn't do five dollars worth of business at the store all day yesterday, and he's as cross as two sticks." "Oh, that's all right."

"Out in the wide world there must be many good things to eat," he thought. "I'd like to find the place where the potato-parings grow." But of all this, Grunty Pig said nothing to anyone. If the chance ever came to slip out of the pen, he intended to take nobody with him. He had not yet caught up with his brothers and sisters in size, even if he had outstripped them in the matter of brains.

At the end of this thoroughfare our unconscious guide plunged into a still darker and fouler impasse, hung across from side to side with rows of dingy linen, and ornamented in the centre with a mound of decaying cabbage-leaves, potato-parings, oyster-shells, and the like.

The plates and dishes were scattered upon it without any order, and loaded with potato-parings and half-picked bones. Several empty bottles emitted an odor of brandy, mixed with the pungent smell of tobacco-smoke. After seating his guest, the farmer lighted his pipe, and his two sons resumed their work by the fireside.

"All right, Mark, that's true. I could sing while I peel the potatoes. You could wash them for me. That would help." They installed themselves for this work. The acrid smell of potato-parings rose in the furnace-like heat of the kitchen, along with the singing voice, asking and answering itself. Mark listened with all his might, laughing and wriggling with appreciation.

'A house of mud, replied Browny, looking longingly at a wet puddle in the corner of the yard. 'And you, Whitey? said the mother pig in rather a sad voice, for she was disappointed that Browny had made so foolish a choice. 'A house of cabbage, answered Whitey, with a mouth full, and scarcely raising her snout out of the trough in which she was grubbing for some potato-parings.

Nay, she would have been contented to wait, even though that waiting should never have been rewarded, had he given her the privilege of regarding herself as his. Money! She would have been contented to live on potato-parings could he have been contented to live with her on potatoes.

The plates and dishes were scattered upon it without any order, and loaded with potato-parings and half-picked bones. Several empty bottles emitted an odor of brandy, mixed with the pungent smell of tobacco-smoke. After seating his guest, the farmer lighted his pipe, and his two sons resumed their work by the fireside.

They would perch and then fly, and for all the rest of the day would be incessantly shifting about from place to place, on the look-out for something to eat, dropping from time to time to snatch up a crust of bread or the core of an apple thrown away by a child in the road, or into a back garden or on to a dust-heap where potato-parings and the head of a mackerel or other refuse had been thrown.