There came very near to being not a dry eye in the house when the simple words were flashed beside an insert of thick, flaky-topped mince pies with quarters cut from them to reveal their noble interiors Sleep came at last while he was regretting that lawless orgy of the morning.

He needn't have cleaned up those beans in that silly way.
He could have left a good half of them.

He ran what might have been considered a split-reel comedy of the stew-pan's bottom still covered with perfectly edible beans lightly protected with Nature's own pastel-tinted shroud for perishing vegetable matter and diversified here and there with casual small deposits of ashes.
In the morning something good really did happen.

As he folded his blankets in the gray light a hard object rattled along the floor from them.

He picked this up before he recognized it as a mutilated fragment from the stale half--loaf of bread he had salvaged.