uired Sally politely, as she removed the
red and white napkin which covered the gift.

"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's
been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."

"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see
me."

"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew,
his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico,
with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in
the back.

"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a
taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an'
she lives around the corner."

"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door
closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the
well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"

"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's
the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"

This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red
face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs.
Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.

"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at
the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small,
half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made
out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought
as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo'
po' ma's--the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the
mornin' arter I buried my man."

Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an
invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a
leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I
forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I
had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I
remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the
funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my
shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to
end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.

"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?"
she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness
of my s