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“As regards this mutton custard,” said Mrs. Partington,
as she held up the spoon with which she was stirring
the preserves, and let the treacle trickle back into the
kettle in syrupticious ropiness, and stirred it again till
the little yellow eyes that bubbled on the top seemed to
snap and wink at Ike who sat whittling a stick and looking
intently at the operation, till his mouth watered
again. “Mutton custard!” and she smiled as the idea
stole across her mind, like the shadow of a cloud in summer
over a green meadow full of dandelion blossoms and
butter-cups. “Some new regiment for sick people,
I dare say; but I hope it 'll be better than the custards
that widow Grudge used to make for the poor, God
bless 'em! with one egg to a quart of milk, and sweetened
with molasses, and thought that Heaven itself was too
small an emuneration for what she had done. But mutton
custard”—

“It is Martin Koszta,” said Ike, who had read the
name to her in the Post of that individual when he arrived
in Boston; “Koszta, the Hungarian.”

“Well,” continued she, “it might have been worse,
as the girl said when she kissed the young minister by
mistake, in the dark entry, for her cousin Betsey, — a
mistake is no haystack, Isaac.”

Isaac silently admitted the truth of the remark as he

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thrust the stick he had been whittling into the kettle,
and then made a drawing of the equatorial line across
both cheeks in warm molasses.