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 piece there was a Toby jug, and some great sea-shells shining faintly with pink and silver.

The little old lady spread a cloth on a little round table, somewhat lopsided with age, that Mrs. Nye could fairly have kissed, it was so like one she herself had left behind; and made the tea. It was excellent tea; half a crown a pound at least, the visitor felt sure; tea is apt to be your real old cottager’s one indulgence. The two women, as they sat, sipping it out of their saucers, and deep in chat, made a suggestive contrast. Mrs. Nye was tall and upright still, her figure was matronly, her black hair still black, her brown eyes quick and bright; the “hot-coloured” nasturtiums in her bonnet were very becoming; the warm brown of her dress lent agreeable emphasis to the roses in her cheeks. The little old lady, on the other hand—Mrs. Stone, it appeared, was her name—was shrunken and shrivelled and bent, and her colouring, originally light, was faded now into colourlessness. She and her buxom companion might well have been sitting as models of early autumn and late.

Mrs. Stone spent her days alone, it appeared, in this little old house that her husband, dead these many years, had built; but she had a married daughter near who “saw to her,” and who “would a’ had me there to live,” she explained, “but there! Childer! Borne ’em I ’ave, an’ buried ’em I ’ave, but now I can’t seem to do wi’ their clatter no more—young things is that restless an’ rumbustious. Which part o’ Henglan’ d’you say you come from, dear?” she inquired.

“I come from Canterbury—Canterbury in England,” Mrs. Nye answered, not without a little