ion Mrs. Burr had derived from a
Japanese Buddha--and suchlike, and Tea.

"However they did without it I cannot think," said she. "On'y, of
course, not having to stitch, stitch, stitch from half-past six in the
morning till bedtime made a difference." Her ideas of our ancestors were
strongly affected by a copper-plate engraving in a print-shop window in
Soho, even as idolatry had been presented to her by a Tea-Man and Grocer
in Tottenham Court Road. It was Stothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims"--_you_
know!--and consequently her _moyen age_ had a falcon on its wrist, and a
jester in attendance, invariably. "They was a good deal in the open air,
and it tells," was her tribute to the memory of this plate. She
developed the subject further, incidentally. "Tryin' on is a change, of
course, but liable to temper, and vexatious when the party insists on
letting out and no allowance of turn-over. The same if too short in
front. What was I a-sayin'?... Oh, Mrs. Prichard--yes! You was
inquiring, ma'am, about the length of time I had known her. Just four
years this Christmas, now I think of it. Time enough and to spare to
tell anything she liked--if she'd have liked. But you may take it from
me, ma'am, on'y to go no further on any account, that Mrs. Prichard is
not, as they say, free-spoke about her family, but on the contrary the
contrairy." Mrs. Burr was unconsciously extending the powers of the
English tongue, in varying one word's force by different accents.

Uncle Moses he cut in, being at home that time:--"Was you saying, ma'am,
that the old widder-lady's husband had been a convict in Australia?"

Oh no!--Mrs. Burr had never got that far. So she testified. Aunt M'riar,
speaking from the sink, where she was extracting out the tea-leaves from
the pot, was for calling Uncle Moses over the coals. Anybody might soon
be afraid to say anything, to have been running away with an idea like
that. No one had ever said any such a thing. Indeed, the convict was
entirely inferential, and had no foundation except in the fact that the
old woman's son had been born at Macquarie Harbour. Uncle Mo's
impression that Van Diemen's Land was a sort of plague-spot on the
planet--the _bacilli_ of the plague being convicted criminals--was no
doubt too well grounded. But it was only a hearsay of youth, and even
elderly men may now fail to grasp the way folk spoke and thought of
those remote horrors, the Penal Settlements, in the early days of last
century-