The Story of My Childhood
37
can see this meal as clearly as if it had been yesterday. A piece of brown bread crust, about two inches square, rye and Indian, baked on the oven bottom; a tiny wine glass, my Christmas gift, full of home-made blackberry cordial, and a wee bit of my mother's well cured old cheese. There was no need to caution me to eat slowly; knowing that I could have no more, and in dread of coming to the last morsel, I nibbled and sipped and swallowed till I mercifully fell asleep from exhaustion.
There are a good many men over the country who would readily believe that sometimes, at the end of a long fast, food might have tasted very good to me, as it did to them; but no food through the longest fast, ever had the relish of that brown bread
