with a sudden pang, she remembered her old father, and how,
on such a day, he would totter to the open door, and there sit in the
sunshine, grateful for the same warmth for which his old dog was
grateful. When she came home from the market, she would make a wreath of
white holly to put on the grave in which he rested. She thought of him
vividly, of the pathos of his last illness from which she had vainly
tried to drive the fear and soften the pain. She remembered his slow
laugh, and the knocking of his stick on the floor. Memory is keener in
bright sunshine than in the twilight, in vivid enjoyment more poignant
than in melancholy. The churchyard, with its unvisited green mound and
dwelling of the silent, became visible to Anne, and with it the dying
out of joy which returns with that vision and memory. The house, too,
was very quiet, as she drew in her head, with the stillness of a place
once lived in and now empty. She had become accustomed to thinking of
her father with tranquillity, satisfied to believe him at rest. Now the
pain of loneliness returned with memory.

She harnessed the pony to the cart, and stowed her baskets safely under
the seat. She was dressed in a purple merino skirt, kilted thickly, a
black mantle, with a bead fringe, and an antiquated straw bonnet. Round
her neck she had folded a man's linen handkerchief, and she had
elastic-sided boots on her feet. She locked the door, and put the keys
in her linen pocket tied round her waist under her skirt, and climbing
up by means of the wheel, seated herself on the board which did duty as
a seat, and took the reins. "Go on, Polly!" she said, and the pony, with
a good deal of tossing of head and tail, set off obediently towards the
high road. The clacking of its feet as it trotted on the hard road
overwhelmed all other sounds. At the corner of the roads an old woman
tending a cow nodded to her, and one or two field labourers raised
themselves to see who was going past, remaining upright and staring
longer than was necessary to satisfy their curiosity. At an open
field-gate she had to wait until two heavy wagons, their wheels a mass
of red, soft earth, had emerged, and turned in the direction of the
town. She passed them, and for some time met no one. An advancing cart
soon came in sight, accompanied by a great jangling of cans--a milk-cart
returning from the station, having sent off its supplies to the town,
now bringing back its empty cans. It was driven by