cousin's charge
in the billiard-room, for an hour or two, greatly to Martin's relief.

"What pretty work you are doing, Cousin Magdalen," said Maudie, stroking
admiringly the large canvas stretched on a frame at which Miss King was
working.

"I am glad you think it's pretty," said her godmother. "I think it is
very pretty; but the colours are not very bright, and children generally
like very bright colours. The pattern is copied from a very old piece of
tapestry."

"What's tapestry?" said Hoodie.

"Old-fashioned work that used to be made long ago," said Miss King. "It
was more like great pictures than anything else, and such quantities of
it were made that whole walls were covered with it. Once when I was a
very little girl I slept in a room all covered with tapestry, and in the
middle of the night----"

She stopped suddenly.

"_What?_" said Hoodie eagerly, peering up into her face. "What came in
the middle of night?"

"I didn't say anything came," said Cousin Magdalen, laughing. "I
stopped because I thought I could make it into a little story and tell
it to you afterwards. But we are forgetting all about your stories. Who
is going to begin? Eldest first--you, Maudie, I suppose."

Maudie looked rather melancholy.

"I can't tell nice stories," she said. "I've been thinking such a time,
and I can't think of anything except something very stupid."

"Well, let us hear it, any way," said her cousin, "and then we can say
if it is stupid or not."

"It was a story I read," said Maudie, "or else some one told it me. I
can't remember which it was. It was about a very poor little girl--she
was dreadfully poor, just as poor as you could fancy."

"No clothes--hadn't she no clothes?" asked Duke.

"And nucken to eat?" added Hec.

"Very little," said Maudie. "Of course she had some, or else she would
have died. She hadn't any father or mother, only an old grandmother, who
wasn't very kind to her. At least she was very old and deaf and all
that, and perhaps that made her cross. And the little girl used to go
messages for a shop--that was how she got a little money. It was a
baker's shop near where they lived, and it was rather a grand shop--only
they kept this little girl to go messages, not to the _grand_ people
that came there, you know, but to the people that bought the bread when
it wasn't so new--and currant cakes that were rather stale--like that,
you know. And on Sunday mornings she had the most to do, because