208 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



daily, and if possible on meat, as rather a metropolitan 

 weakness, which was to be politely allowed for. The 

 other day I should have gone meatless, but for a certain 

 astuteness of forethought, met by a yielding benevo- 

 lence on the part of the captain's wife. ^leat was not 

 to be had for love or money, especially love. The 

 " country " had been scoured for a fowl — 



"But no such animal the meadows cropp'd." 



I saw myself midway in the dilemma of going impran- 

 sus, or of cooking my Actinise with what appetite I 

 could — an extremity which, in a zoologist, would have 

 been only a milder form of cannibalism. Standing thus 

 at the point of intersection of two such paths, the pangs 

 of prospective hunger developed in me new resources 

 and new impudences. I went boldly to Mrs Tregar- 

 then (observe she is not a ividoiv), and to her patheti- 

 cally unfolded the case, on the supposition that she 

 might not be utterly meatless, in which circumstance 

 the loan of a chop or steak might gracefully be accorded. 

 Meatless the gentle and generous woman w^as not. A 

 piece of beef, killed eight days ago, and now kept fresh 

 in salt against emergencies, would furnish me with a 

 steak sufficient for two days, and there was a rumour 

 that on the third day beef would be killed, when I 

 could stock myself till next killing-time. Beef, at 

 sevenpence a-pound, as I said, is the only meat you can 

 reckon on, even with forethought In the time of 

 Borlase it was just the contrary, mutton being then 

 the meat, and beef a rarity. " About twenty years 

 since," he says, " the inhabitants generally lived on salt 



