The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (12.1897)

My Note-Book in the Weald

By Menie Muriel Dowie

The title of these sketches has reference to many wanderings,
afoot, driving, but mainly on horseback, which I have enjoyed
from time to time in the wealds of Surrey and Sussex. If you
stand on Blackdown or on Witley Hill and look out over the folds
and oak-forests spread below you to the very verge of the downs,
you see the country where Stephen Yesser still carves the haunch
of mutton—as I believe, inimitably : and the country where the
landlord’s wedding, at which I assisted, is still remembered as one
of the merriest days in Puddingfold.

I—Stephen Yesser

To see him standing by the sideboard in his loose-fitting dress-
suit, his eye upon the table in the window no less than on
the table by the fire and the table in the centre, his ear hanging
upon the tinkle of the bell from the commercial room and the
private sitting-room upstairs, where a party was dining, his mind
upon the joint delicately furrowed by his unerring carver—to see
him so, you might have mistaken him for an ordinary waiter.
But even to call him a waiter of unusual ability would have been

to