ade them look rather like Aunt Trevor, Maisie thought.

"Now, walk slowly," said Dennis, and she did try to control her fears;
but as usual, the moment the turkey-cock began to gobble, she began to
run, and did not stop until she was safe on the other side of the gate.
From this refuge she watched Dennis, admiring him greatly as he came
slowly on, shaking his stick in the turkey-cock's face, and was quite
ready to agree with him when he called her a coward.

"Only I can't help it," she added.

"But you ought to," was Dennis's reply. "It's silly, even for a girl,
to be afraid of a turkey-cock."

Old Sally's thatched cottage was so near the farm-buildings that it
almost looked like one of them, but a narrow lane really ran between,
and it stood on its own little plot of ground. At its door there was an
immense horse-chestnut, which she could "mind," she said, helping to
plant when she was a girl. She had held it straight in the hole while
old Mr Solace, the grandfather of this young Master Andrew, had filled
in the earth. She was most sorry to think she had done it now, for this
ungrateful tree so shaded her window that it made her cottage dark, and
besides this, choked up her well, by dropping its great leaves into it
in the autumn.

Old Sally could "mind" so many things on account of her age, that she
was a most amusing and instructive person to visit. She had worked for
the Solaces as child, girl, and woman, and now she was pensioned off,
and allowed to live in her cottage rent-free with her one remaining
unmarried daughter, Anne, of whom she always spoke as her "good child."
Anne was over seventy years old, and weakly with bad health and
rheumatism, so that there was nothing very youthful about her. Indeed,
when they sat side by side, both in sunbonnets which they wore indoors
and out, it was difficult to say which was the elder of the two old
women.

Old Sally, in spite of a long life of hard work, was still straight and
wiry, and her brown old face, wrinkled as a withered nut, was lively and
shrewd. There was only one point in which Anne had the advantage, and
that was in hearing, for her mother was very deaf, and obliged to use a
trumpet. This she was always shy of producing, and to-day she allowed
Anne to scream into her ear what the children said for some time; but at
last, seeing a very earnest expression on Maisie's face, she took the
trumpet out with a bashful smile and presented the end to her.