rround him in an eager circle, and inquire the
latest news.

In an unwise moment we begged the draper's wife to honour us with
a visit and explain the obliquities of the kitchen range and the
tortuosities of the sink-spout to Miss Grieve. While our landlady was
on the premises, I took occasion to invite her up to my own room, with a
view of seeing whether my mattress of pebbles and iron-filings could
be supplemented by another of shavings or straw, or some material less
provocative of bodily injuries. She was most sympathetic, persuasive,
logical and after the manner of her kind proved to me conclusively that
the trouble lay with the too-saft occupant of the bed, not with the
bed itself, and gave me statistics with regard to the latter which
established its reputation and at the same moment destroyed my own.

She looked in at the various doors casually as she passed up and down
the stairs,--all save that of the dining-room, which Francesca had
prudently locked to conceal the fact that we had covered the family
portraits,--and I noticed at the time that her face wore an expression
of mingled grief and astonishment. It seemed to us afterward that there
was a good deal more passing up and down the loaning than when we first
arrived. At dusk especially, small processions of children and young
people walked by our cottage and gave shy glances at the windows.

Finding Miss Grieve in an unusually amiable mood, I inquired the
probable cause of this phenomenon. She would not go so far as to give
any judicial opinion, but offered a few conjectures.

It might be the tirling-pin; it might be the white satin ribbons on the
curtains; it might be the guitars and banjos; it might be the bicycle
crate; it might be the profusion of plants; it might be the continual
feasting and revelry; it might be the blazing fires in a Pettybaw
summer. She thought a much more likely reason, however, was because
it had become known in the village that we had moved every stick
of furniture in the house out of its accustomed place and taken the
dressing-tables away from the windows,--'the windys,' she called them.

I discussed this matter fully with Mr. Macdonald later on. He laughed
heartily, but confessed, with an amused relish of his national
conservatism, that to his mind there certainly was something radical,
advanced, and courageous in taking a dressing-table away from its place,
back to the window, and putting it anywhere else in a room. He wou