tations and have the then
Miss Garscubes making remarks about me."

"They might not make very complimentary remarks, perhaps," said Alice.

"If they thought of me at all I should be satisfied," said he.

"Couldn't you invent an iron bed, then?" said Miss Adamson, looking at
a representation of these articles hanging alongside the three royal
ladies. "Perhaps they'll last three hundred years, and if you could
bind yourself up with the idea of sweet repose--"

"They won't last three hundred years," said Lady Arthur--"cheap and
nasty, new-fangled things!"

"They maybe cheap and nasty," said George, "but new-fangled they are
not: they must be some thousands of years old. I am afraid, my dear
aunt, you don't read your Bible."

"Don't drag the Bible in among your nonsense. What has it to do with
iron beds?" said Lady Arthur.

"If you look into Deuteronomy, third chapter and eleventh verse,"
said he "you'll find that Og, king of Bashar used an iron bed. It is
probably in existence yet, and it must be quite old enough to make it
worth your while to look after it: perhaps Mr. Cook would personally
conduct you, or if not I should be glad to be your escort."

"Thank you," she said: "when I go in search of Og's bed I'll take you
with me."

"You could not do better: I have the scent of a sleuth-hound for
antiquities."

As they were speaking a man came and hung up beside the queens and
the iron beds a big white board on which were printed in large black
letters the words, "My Mother and I"--nothing more.

"What _can_ the meaning of that be?" asked Lady Arthur.

"To make you ask the meaning of it," said Mr. Eildon. "I who am
skilled in these matters have no doubt that it is the herald of some
soothing syrup for the human race under the trials of teething." He
was standing at the carriage-door till the train would start, and he
stood aside to let a young lady and a boy in deep mourning enter. The
pair were hardly seated when the girl's eye fell on the great white
board and its announcement. She bent her head and hid her face in her
handkerchief: it was not difficult to guess that she had very recently
parted with her mother for ever, and the words on the board were more
than she could stand unmoved.

Miss Adamson too had been thinking of her mother, the hard-working
woman who had toiled in her little shop to support her sickly husband
and educate her daughter--the kindly patient face, the hands that had
never spared th