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 won’t never grow sweet, come all Eternity. Now, Buffy, I’m a-goin’ to fill up your saucer again, an’ that’s to do for dinner—hear, Puss? ’Cause autumn is a-callin’ an’ a-callin’ o’ pore missus, an’ missus, she’s a-goin’ forth to find it.”

While she had been speaking, Mrs. Nye had been putting her apron off and her boots and her bonnet on. Now she carried out both cat and saucer to the shed, locked the house-door, hung the key in the secret nook known only to her son and herself, and went down the white shell path, and out on to the road.

The cottage was one of a straggling handful built almost upon the brink of a wide estuary. There was first the sandy road, then a narrow border of sea-side plants—lemon lupin and pink convolvulus, flowerless at this season, pale bents and the weed vituperated by gardeners under the name of “fat-hen”; then came the foreshore of wan sand, littered with dry grey waterweed; and then the greenish water. The tide was at half-ebb this morning, and islets of yellow-grey mud emerged from it here and there; the sand-dunes that formed the opposite shore lay so low and so far off that they made only the narrowest of auburn lines against the steep, empty sky.

Things seen differ, as we know, with the angle from which we see them; looked down upon from the inland hills, the river-mouth shone all a lovely maze of rare curves and colours. But, here at the Point, it was incontestably a very flat world, and somewhat dull of hue. Neither did its ramshackle settlement do much to redeem it. The cottages looked as though they had been run up in some