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- 5743
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:45.581Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5674
- text
- answering two ends--ends so very distinct."
"Very distinct, indeed."
"Ah! that is your way. Making sport of earnest. But never mind. We have
been talking of snow; but common rain-water--such as falls all the year
round--is still more kindly. Not to speak of its known fertilizing
quality as to fields, consider it in one of its minor lights. Pray, did
you ever hear of a 'Poor Man's Egg'?"
"Never. What is that, now?"
"Why, in making some culinary preparations of meal and flour, where
eggs are recommended in the receipt-book, a substitute for the eggs
may be had in a cup of cold rain-water, which acts as leaven. And so a
cup of cold rain-water thus used is called by housewives a 'Poor Man's
Egg.' And many rich men's housekeepers sometimes use it."
"But only when they are out of hen's eggs, I presume, dear Blandmour.
But your talk is--I sincerely say it--most agreeable to me. Talk on."
"Then there's 'Poor Man's Plaster' for wounds and other bodily harms;
an alleviative and curative, compounded of simple, natural things; and
so, being very cheap, is accessible to the poorest sufferers. Rich men
often use 'Poor Man's Plaster'."
"But not without the judicious advice of a fee'd physician, dear
Blandmour."
"Doubtless, they first consult the physician; but that may be an
unnecessary precaution."
"Perhaps so. I do not gainsay it. Go on."
"Well, then, did you ever eat of a 'Poor Man's Pudding'?"
"I never so much as heard of it before."
"Indeed! Well, now you shall eat of one; and you shall eat it, too, as
made, unprompted, by a poor man's wife, and you shall eat it at a poor
man's table, and in a poor man's house. Come now, and if after this
eating, you do not say that a 'Poor Man's Pudding' is as relishable as
a rich man's, I will give up the point altogether; which briefly is:
that, through kind Nature, the poor, out of their very poverty, extract
comfort."
Not to narrate any more of our conversations upon this subject (for
we had several--I being at that time the guest of Blandmour in the
country, for the benefit of my health), suffice it that acting upon
Blandmour's hint, I introduced myself into Coulter's house on a wet
Monday noon (for the snow had thawed), under the innocent pretense of
craving a pedestrian's rest and refreshment for an hour or two.
I was greeted, not without much embarrassment--owing, I suppose to my
dress--but still with unaffected and honest kindness. Dame Coulter was
just leaving the wash-tub to get ready her one o'clock meal against
her good man's return from a deep wood about a mile distant among the
hills, where he was chopping by day's work--seventy-five cents per day
and found himself. The washing being done outside the main building,
under an infirm-looking old shed, the dame stood upon a half-rotten
soaked board to protect her feet, as well as might be, from the
penetrating damp of the bare ground; hence she looked pale and chill.
But her paleness had still another and more secret cause--the paleness
of a mother to be. A quiet, fathomless heart-trouble, too, couched
beneath the mild, resigned blue of her soft and wife-like eye. But
she smiled upon me, as apologizing for the unavoidable disorder of a
Monday and a washing-day, and, conducting me into the kitchen, set me
down in the best seat it had--an old-fashioned chair of an enfeebled
constitution.
- title
- Chunk 14