--according to a pleasing fiction of
Dolly Wardle--that little person's doll had brought upstairs for her,
keeping wide awake until she see 'em safe on the table in a mug. But the
sound and the smell were of the essence of the mill, and were sweet to
the old heart that was dying slowly down--would soon die outright. Both
merged in a real dream with her sister's voice in it, saying
inexplicably: "In the pocket of your shot silk, dear." Then she woke
with a start, sorry to lose the dream; specially annoyed that she had
not heard what the carman--outside with her father--had begun to say
about the thing Phoebe was speaking of. She forgot what that was, and it
was very stupid of her.

That was Mr. Bartlett outside, laying bricks; not the carman at all.
What was that he was saying?

"B'longed to a Punch's show, he did. Couldn't stand it no longer, he
couldn't. The tune it got on his narves, it did! If it hadn't 'a been
for a sort o' reel ease he got takin' of it quick and slow--like the
Hoarperer--he'd have gave in afore; so there was no pretence. It's all
werry fine to say temp'ry insanity, but I tell you it's the contrairy
when a beggar comes to his senses and drownds hisself. Wot'd the Pope do
if he had to play the same tune over and over and over and over?...
Mortar, John! And 'and me up a nice clean cutter. That's your quorlity,
my son." And the Court rang musically to the destruction of a good
brick.

John--who was only Mr. Bartlett's son for purposes of rhetoric--slapped
his cold unwholesome mortar-pudding with a spade; and ceded an
instalment, presumably. Then his voice came: "Wot didn't he start on a
new toon for, for a wariation?"

Mr. Bartlett was doing something very nice and exact with the
three-quarter he had just evolved, so his reply came in fragments as
from a mind preoccupied. "Tried it on he had--that game--more times
than once.... But the boys they took it up, and aimed stones.... And the
public kep' its money in its pocket--not to encourage noo Frenchified
notions--not like when they was a boy. So the poor beggar had to jump in
off of the end of Southend Pier, and go out with the tide." He added, as
essential, that Southend Pier was better than two mile long; so there
was water to drownd a man when the tide was in.

The attention of very old people may be caught by a familiar word,
though such talk as this ripples by unheeded. The sad tale of the
Punch's showman--the exoteric one, evidently--roused