about midday
I am told that Kinkle made a very good thing indeed out of him for Lady Wondershoot , consuming as he did scarcely anything but his food , though that never restrained her denunciation of `` the Creature '' as a gigantic parasite upon her charity ... . At that time he used to wear a sort of smock of sacking , trousers of patched leather , and iron-shod sabots . Over his head was sometimes a queer thing -- a worn-out beehive straw chair it was , but usually he went bareheaded . He would be moving about the pit with a powerful deliberation , and the Vicar on his constitutional round would get there about midday to find him shamefully eating his vast need of food with his back to all the world . His food was brought to him every day , a mess of grain in the husk , in a truck -- a small railway truck , like one of the trucks he was perpetually filling with chalk , and this load he used to char in an old limekiln and then devour . Sometimes he would mix with it a bag of sugar . Sometimes he would sit licking a lump of such salt as is given to cows , or eating a huge lump of dates , stones and all , such as one sees in London on barrows .