Page:Carroll Rankin--Dandelion Cottage.djvu/70

 50  be curious about the occupants. One day, Mrs. Bartholomew Crane, who lived almost directly opposite the cottage, found herself so devoured by kindly curiosity, that she could stand it no longer. Intending to be neighbourly, for Mrs. Crane was always neighbourly in the best sense of the word, she put on her one good dress and started across the street to call on the newcomers.

It was really a great undertaking for Mrs. Crane to pay visits, for she was a stout, slow-moving person, and, owing to the antiquity and consequent tenderness of her best garments, it was an even greater undertaking for the good woman to make a visiting toilet. Her best black silk, for instance, had to be neatly mended with court-plaster, when all other remedies had failed, and her old, thread-lace collars had been darned until their original floral patterns had given place to a mosaic of spider webs. Mrs. Crane's motives, however, were far better than her clothes. Years before, when she was newly