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The sea-kale, which had been covered up carefully with seaweed, to blanch and to protect it from the frost, was attacked in the cold dry weather in a most furious manner by blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. They tore away the seaweed with their strong bills, pitching it right and left behind them in as workmanlike style as any miner, and so boring deep notches into the edge of the bed.

At seven he sat down to the morbid sort of a meal one gets in London lodgings: a calm soup; a segment of vague fish smothered painlessly in a pale pink blanket of sauce; a cut from the joint, rare and lukewarm; potatoes boiled dead; sad sea-kale; nonconformist pudding; conservative biscuit, and radical cheese.

Then came the second Friday after Graham's departure, and Lady Staveley observed, as she and her daughter sat at dinner alone, that Madeline would eat nothing but potatoes and sea-kale. "My dear, you will be ill if you don't eat some meat." "Oh no, I shall not," said Madeline with her prettiest smile. "But you always used to like minced veal."

A man of about fifty, well and plainly dressed, who did not appear to be in ill-health, yet whose complexion had a blanched look, like forced sea-kale; a man of under, rather than over middle height, not of slight make, but lean as if the flesh had been all worn off his bones; a man with sad, anxious, outlooking, abstracted eyes, with a nose slightly hooked, without a trace of whisker, with hair thin and straight and flaked with white, active and lithe in his movements, a swift walker, though he had a slight halt.

A few large drops of blood fell upon his arms; he washed them off, stopped the bleeding, and found that the loss of a little blood had actually made him feel lighter in his head and in his heart. A small quantity of sea-kale was growing in the sand; he broke a blade off of it, and stuck it in his hat.

The blanching-pots for this use are somewhat of the same shape and size as the large bell-glasses commonly employed in market gardens for raising tender vegetable crops, but made of the same materials as the common earthenware, having a handle at the top. They may be about a foot and a half in diameter at the rim where they apply to the ground. Forcing sea-kale.

"Remember it! I should think so; and how I improved the occasion." "Yes; you did improve fast enough. And the sea-kale, Mr. Graham. Laws! the row I had with John Gardener about that! And, Mr. Graham, do you remember how a certain friend used to come and ask after you at the door? Dear, dear, dear! I nearly caught it about that."

''Osses and cattle' seemed so very mild after what she had pictured. "I think we'd better go and look on the moor," she said impatiently, as Ephraim showed every sign of making a prolonged search amongst the sea-kale pots, taking the cover off each one in turn. Almost reluctantly he followed her. In the path there still stood Poppy's little watering-can.

"Ugh!" grunted the constable angrily; and he turned again and went on. "I say, don't be in such a hurry; there's the sea-kale pots, too." "Ah, to be sure!" cried Waller, loud enough for the constable to hear. "Gusset must be right. Better come back and have another look. He may be in one of the sties disguised as a pig."

Salt has also the power of destroying them in an effectual manner, without injuring the sea-kale. The crop, it is said, will be ready to cut and gather in three weeks or a month from the first application of the heat; but as much danger and mischief are the consequence when this is violent, it is advised to begin soon enough, and to force slowly, rather than in too quick a manner.