No sooner does he get half a mouthful--" "Geraldine, put it on the hob, my dear, and a basin over it.

Matilda, my love, you know my maxim--'Duty first, dinner afterward.' Cadman, I will come with you." The revenue officer took up his hat (which had less time now than his dinner to get cold) and followed Cadman to the usual place for holding privy councils.

This was under the heel of the pier (which was then about half as long as now) at a spot where the outer wall combed over, to break the crest of the surges in the height of a heavy eastern gale.
At neap tides, and in moderate weather, this place was dry, with a fine salt smell; and with nothing in front of it but the sea, and nothing behind it but solid stone wall, any one would think that here must be commune sacred, secret, and secluded from eavesdroppers.

And yet it was not so, by reason of a very simple reason.
Upon the roadway of the pier, and over against a mooring-post, where the parapet and the pier itself made a needful turn toward the south, there was an equally needful thing, a gully-hole with an iron trap to carry off the rain that fell, or the spray that broke upon the fabric; and the outlet of this gully was in the face of the masonry outside.

Carroway, not being gifted with a crooked mind, had never dreamed that this little gut might conduct the pulses of the air, like the Tyrant's Ear, and that the trap at the end might be a trap for him.