Australian Tales - Setis

Woes and Worries of Mrs. Lemonpip.
Chapter 1
“DRAT the door!” grumbled Mrs. Lemonpip, as she bustled along the
passage from the kitchen; her hands and arms bespattered with pancake
paste, and the tip of her strawberry nose garnished with saucepan soot.
“Drat that door, I say! I wish I could make the knocker red hot, and keep
it so, then I'll warrant those cadgers, and costermongers, and other
nuisances, would not be so fond of playing rat-tat-tat, to worrit me till
I'm savage enough to bite everybody. What do you want?” she asked
sharply, as she opened the door just wide enough to show her face, but
not her figure, which was the most comely part of her person. “What do
you want?”
“Con you help a poor mon, missis?” said a poverty-stricken individual,
with a basket before him, filled with boxes of matches. “I coom'd out
from whoam a week or two agone, wi me wife and three young uns, and
they be all zick.”
“Go and nurse them then,” said Mrs. Lemonpip. “You ought to be
ashamed of yourself for leaving them if they are sick. There now be off,
be off: I don't want to hear any more of your grievances, which I dare say
are half sham, I have nothing to give away, and if I had I would not give
it to you for your impudence, in rapping rat-tat at my door as if you were
an alderman. Be off, or I'll call my bull dog.”
“Will you buy a dozen o' matches, missis? you shall have them for
ninepence. Do, mar'm, and God bless you.”
“No, I won't buy a farthingsworth,” shrieked Mrs. Lemonpip, with a
look at the poor fellow almost fierce enough to set fire to his basket. “Go
and work, you lazy lump, and don't come here any more with your
matches or your miserable stories either: I won't encourage hawking,
which is very often a mere blind for begging, and begging means
stealing. I believe it was somebody like you that stole my door scraper
last Monday morning. Be off, I say again!” She then slammed the door in
the poor hungry fellow's face, and bustled back to the kitchen, to peel the
potatoes, and make other preparations for her gude man's dinner; and to
vent from time to time little accumulations of ill-humour upon the head
of the cat, in the absence of any other animate creature, that she could
make uncomfortable.