The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. Bensington to be the

first almoners on earth of the Food of the Gods, were not only very

perceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr.

Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers of

general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.

They were named Skinner, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. Bensington

interviewed them in a small room with hermetically sealed windows, a

spotted overmantel looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias.

Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, with dirty white hair

drawn back very very tightly from a face that had begun by being

chiefly, and was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and the

wrinkling up of everything else, ending by being almost

exclusively--nose. She was dressed in slate colour (so far as her dress

had any colour) slashed in one place with red flannel. She let him in

and talked to him guardedly and peered at him round and over her nose,

while Mr. Skinner she alleged made some alteration in his toilette. She

had one tooth that got into her articulations and she held her two long

wrinkled hands nervously together. She told Mr. Bensington that she had

managed fowls for years; and knew all about incubators; in fact, they

themselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and it had only failed at

last through the want of pupils. "It's the pupils as pay," said Mrs.

Skinner.

Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and a

squint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippers

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth