Preserve us and keep us through another night." I suppose it was a very ordinary farm meal, but it seems to me I never tasted a better one.

The huge piles of new baked bread, the sweet farm butter, already delicious with the flavour of new grass, the bacon and eggs, the potatoes, the rhubarb sauce, the great plates of new, hot gingerbread and, at the last, the custard pie--a great wedge of it, with fresh cheese.

After the first ravenous appetite of hardworking men was satisfied, there came to be a good deal of lively conversation.

The girls had some joke between them which Ben was trying in vain to fathom.
The older son told how much milk a certain Alderney cow had given, and Mr.Stanley, quite changed now as he sat at his own table from the rather grim farmer of the afternoon, revealed a capacity for a husky sort of fun, joking Ben about his potato-planting and telling in a lively way of his race with me.

As for Mrs.Stanley, she sat smiling behind her tall coffee pot, radiating good cheer and hospitality.