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Even then our hands were busy making lighters or splint brooms, or paring and quartering and stringing the apples or cracking butternuts while Aunt Deel read. After the sheep came we kept only two cows. The absence of cattle was a help to the general problem of cleanliness. The sheep were out in the fields and I kept away from them for fear the rams would butt me.
Wherever Aunt Cheerie was, the children were sure to be; and so there was Sunbeam, knife in hand, and Fairy, cutting a paring something less than half an inch thick, while the dear little Chicken was wiping apples for the others to pare, and little Tow-head, baby-brother, was trying to upset the peach-box, in which were a couple of pet chickens, that were hatched out too late, and that had to be kept in-doors to secure them from Jack Frost.
In instances where a part is lost or so broken as to be little less than pulverised, there is only one course open, that of paring down the sides of the aperture so that the fresh wood may be accurately fitted to it.
I took a turn in the garden, in the heavenly cool of the early morning, to compose my nerves for a very probable ordeal, and then I walked boldly into the kitchen where Prudence sat, with a wooden bowl in her lap, paring apples. It was one of the unwritten laws of the cuisine that Prudence was never to be disturbed when engaged in this delicate operation.
So I seriously set about trying to do nothing. Well, what with whistling, hammering down all the nails in the house that had started, paring my nails, pulling my fire to pieces and rebuilding it, changing my clothes to full dress though I dined alone, trying to make out the figure of a Cupid on my discolored ceiling, and thinking of a lady I had not thought of for ten years before, I got along the first week tolerably well.
I look twice at a penny; but she looks twice at both sides of a halfpenny before she will let him go: and it's her being so close have raised all this here bobbery; and so I told her; says I, 'Missus, if you would but leave an end of a dip, or a paring of cheese, about your cupboard, she would hide at home; but you hungers her so, you drives her afield right on atop o' my roots. 'Oh, says my missus, 'if I was to be as wasteful as you be, where should we be come Christmas day?
These were so extensive that, by dint of clipping and paring here, adding and eking there, and creating over-lords upon all the estate which Bertram held of the crown, they advanced at the day of contest at the head of ten as good men of parchment as ever took the oath of trust and possession. This strong reinforcement turned the dubious day of battle.
Weston looked at both the models, and then, taking up the card one, unfolded it, and, after paring part of it away with his knife, bent it into a slightly different shape. "I think that should meet the purpose. I once worked under the engineer of a very similar machine for a month or two," he said.
Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.
Martin looked despairingly at Mark, who informed him that the Captain meant a written notice that Mr Chuzzlewit would receive the Watertoasters that day, at and after two o'clock which was in effect then hanging in the bar, as Mark, from ocular inspection of the same, could testify. 'You wouldn't be unpop'lar, I know, said the Captain, paring his nails.
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