ith
you, youngfellermelad. Come on this way. She's on the front verandah.'

I found myself involuntarily seeking to emulate Mr. Perkins's
remarkable method of locomotion. But I might as well have sought to
mimic an albatross or a balloon. It was not only his splendid
rotundity which I lacked. The difference went far beyond that. He had
oiled castors running on patent ball bearings, and I was but the
ordinary pedestrian youth.

We found Mrs. Perkins reclining on a couch on the front verandah, a
very gaily coloured dust-rug covering the lower part of her figure.
Like many people in Australia she could hardly be classified socially;
or, perhaps, I should say she did not possess in any marked form the
characteristics which in England are associated with this or that
social grade. If there was nothing of the aristocrat about her, it
might be said that she was not in the least typically 'middle-class';
and I am sure the severest critic would have hesitated to say that
hers were the manners, disposition, or outlook of any 'lower' class.
Yet she had married an itinerant cobbler, or at best a
'pedestrialatory specialist,' and, I am sure, without the smallest
sense of taking a derogatory step.

Mrs. Perkins was the more a revelation to me perhaps, because, as it
happened, Mrs. Gabbitas had said nothing whatever about her. I learned
presently that she had not stood upon her feet for more than ten
years. I was never told the exact nature of the disease from which she
suffered, but I know she had lost permanently the use of her legs, and
that she was not allowed to sit up in a chair for more than an hour at
a time. She never moved anywhere without her husband. He carried her
from one room to another, and at times to different parts of the
garden; always very skilfully, and without the slightest appearance of
exertion. I think it likely she did not weigh more than six or seven
stone. Whenever I saw her carried, there was always draped about her a
gaily coloured rug or large shawl; and she was for ever smiling, or
actually laughing, or making some quaintly humorous little remark. I
wondered sometimes if she had borrowed her playfulness in speech from
her husband, or if he had borrowed from her. I do not think I ever met
a happier pair.

'So here you are!' she said, as we drew near. Her tone suggested that
my coming were the arrival of a very welcome and long-looked-for
guest. 'You see, Nick, I am so lazy that I never go to any on