rosy and fresh like mummie's or Dumpty's, but they were of a
purple-grey colour, and when she opened her mouth, instead of a row of
pearly white teeth showing, there was only one very large yellow tooth,
which looked as if it could not stay much longer in the gum.

The twins always thought that she must live on milk, as babies do before
they have any teeth, but to their amazement they heard that last
Christmas, at the Old People's Tea, Poor Jane had eaten two plates of
salt beef.

"Do you think she sucked it?" Dumpty asked her brother that evening when
nurse was safely out of the way. Humpty asked daddy the next day at
lunch how old people managed to eat when they had only one tooth.

[Sidenote: Humpty's Experiment]

Daddy said they "chewed," and showed Humpty how it was done, and there
was a scene that afternoon in the nursery at tea, when Humpty practised
"chewing" his bread and honey. And in the end Dumpty went down alone to
the drawing-room for games that evening, with this message from Nan:
"Master Humphrey has behaved badly at the tea-table, and been sent to
bed."

[Illustration: BARBARA'S VISIT.]

But although the children met Poor Jane every time that they went into
the village they had never once spoken to her. That was because she was
not one of nurse's friends, like old Mrs. Jenks, whom Barbara, the
twins' elder sister, visited every week with flowers or fruit or other
good things. Nan considered that Poor Jane was too dirty for one of her
friends.

Poor Jane was so interesting because she had so much to say to herself,
and, as daddy said, "gibbered like a monkey" when she walked alone.

All day long she would wander up and down the village street, and when
the children came out of school and the boys began to tease, she would
curl her long black-nailed fingers--which were so like birds' claws--at
her persecutors, and would run towards them as if she meant to scratch
out their eyes.

Early last spring the twins met with their first real adventure. They
had had lots of little adventures before, such as the time when Humpty
fell into the pond at his cousins' and was nearly drowned, and when
Dumpty had a tooth drawn, and because she was brave and did not make a
fuss, daddy and mummie each presented her with a shilling, and even the
dentist gave her a penny and a ride in his chair.

But this time it was a real adventure because every one--twins
included--was frightened.

The twins had just recovere