John Bull's other Island by George Bernard Shaw

Next morning Broadbent and Larry are sitting at the ends of a / breakfast table in the middle of a small grass plot before / Cornelius Doyle's house. They have finished their meal, and are / buried in newspapers. Most of the crockery is crowded upon a / large square black tray of japanned metal. The teapot is of brown / delft ware. There is no silver; and the butter, on a dinner / plate, is en bloc. The background to this breakfast is the house, / a small white slated building, accessible by a half-glazed door. / A person coming out into the garden by this door would find the / table straight in front of him, and a gate leading to the road / half way down the garden on his right; or, if he turned sharp to / his left, he could pass round the end of the house through an / unkempt shrubbery. The mutilated remnant of a huge planter / statue, nearly dissolved by the rains of a century, and vaguely / resembling a majestic female in Roman draperies, with a wreath in / her hand, stands neglected amid the laurels. Such statues, though / apparently works of art, grow naturally in Irish gardens. Their / germination is a mystery to the oldest inhabitants, to whose / means and taste they are totally foreign.

There is a rustic bench, much roiled by the birds, and / decorticated and split by the weather, near the little gate. At / the opposite side, a basket lies unmolested because it might as / well be there as anywhere else. An empty chair at the table was / lately occupied by Cornelius, who has finished his breakfast and / gone in to the room in which he receives rents and keeps his / books and cash, known in the household as "the office. " This / chair, like the two occupied by Larry and Broadbent, has a / mahogany frame and is upholstered in black horsehair.