does not live long into the heart of the night, as it
did in the long summer twilights. Love cools and the dews fall, and the
winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon
scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass
is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the
leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below
their old boughs stript and cold. And he goes home and has all sorts of
things for breakfast, being in England.

But no early riser had had this experience at Chorlton-under-Bradbury on
that October afternoon when Dave Wardle, personally conducted by Sister
Nora, and very tired with travelling from a distant railway-station--the
local line was not there in the fifties--descended from the coach or
omnibus at the garden gate of Widow Thrale, the good woman who was going
to feed him, sleep him, and enjoy his society during convalescence.

The coach or omnibus touched its hat and accepted something from Sister
Nora, and went on to the Six Bells in High Street, where the something
took the form of something else to drink, which got into its head. The
High Street was very wide, and had more water-troughs for horses than
recommended themselves to the understanding. But they might have
succeeded in doing so before the railway came in these parts, turning
everything to the rightabout, as Trufitt phrased it at the Bells. There
were six such troughs within a hundred yards; and, as their contents
never got into the horses' heads, what odds if there were? When the
world was reasonable and four or five horns were heard blowing at once,
often enough, in the high road, no one ever complained, that old Trufitt
ever heard tell of. So presumably there were no odds.

Widow Thrale lived with an old lady of eighty, who was also a widow;
or, one might have said, even more so, seeing that her widowhood was a
double one, her surname, Marrable, being the third she had borne. She
was, however, never called Widow Marrable, but always Granny Marrable;
and Dave's hostess, who was to take charge of him, was not her daughter,
as might have seemed most probable, but a niece who had filled the place
of a daughter to her and was always so spoken of. What an active and
vigorous octogenarian she was may be judged from the fact that, at the
moment of the story, she was taking on herself the task of ushering into
the world her first great-grandchild, the son