on this earth so tried?" demanded Mrs
Penhaligon, lifting her eyes to two hams and a flitch of bacon she
had just suspended from the rafters, and invoking them as Cleopatra
the injurious gods. "As if 'twasn' enough to change the best kitchen
in all Polpier for quarters where you can't swing a cat, but on top
of it I must be afflicted with a child that's taken wi' the indoors
habit; and in the middle of August month, too, when every one as
means to grow up a comfort to all concerned is out stretchin' his
legs an' makin' himself scarce an' gettin' a breath o' nice fresh air
into his little lungs."

"What's lungs?" asked 'Biades.

"There was a boy in the south of Ireland somewhere," his mother
answered, collecting a few wash-cloths she had hung to dry on the
door of the cooking apparatus, "as took to his bed with nothing the
matter at the age o' fourteen. Next day, when his mother called him
to get up, he said he wasn't took very well. An' this went on, day
after day, until now he's forty years old an' the use of his limbs
completely gone from him. That's a fact, for I read it on the
newspaper with names an' dates, and only three nights ago I woke up
dreamin' upon that poor woman, workin' her fingers to the bone an'
saddled with a bed-riding son. Little did I think at the time--"

Mrs Penhaligon broke off and sighed between desperation and
absent-mindedness.

"I like this stove," answered 'Biades. "It's got a shiny knob on the
door, 'stead of a latch."

"How the child does take notice! . . . Yes, a nice shiny knob it is,
and if you won't come out to the back-yard an' watch while I pin
these things on the clothes-line, you must stay here an' study your
disobedient face in it. The fire's out, so you can't tumble in an'
be burnt to a coal like the wicked children in Nebuchadnezzar: which
is a comfort, so far as it goes. Nor I can't send you out to s'arch
for your sister, wi' the knowledge that it'll surely end in her
warmin' your little sit-upon. . . . I'd do it myself, this moment,"--
the mother grew wrathful only to relent,--"if I could be sure you
weren't sickenin' for something. You're behavin' so unnatural."
She eyed him anxiously. "If it should turn out to be a case o'
suppressed measles, now, I'd hate to go to my grave wi' the thought
that I'd banged 'em in."

So Mrs Penhaligon, having picked up her clothes, issued forth into
the sunlight of the back-yard. 'Biades watched her through the
narrow kitc