"And do you still go to the House to read to my lady?"

"Yes, I go and read, Mrs. Martin; but as to getting my lady to hearken, that's more than a team of six horses could force her to do."

The girl had a remarkably smart and fluent utterance, which was probably a cause, or a consequence, of her vocation.

"'Tis the same story, then?" said grandmother Martin.

"Yes. Eaten out with listlessness. She's neither sick nor sorry, but how dull and dreary she is, only herself can tell. When I get there in the morning, there she is sitting up in bed, for my lady don't care to get up; and then she makes me bring this book and that book, till the bed is heaped up with immense volumes that half bury her, making her look, as she leans upon her elbow, like the stoning of Stephen. She yawns; then she looks towards the tall glass; then she looks out at the weather, mooning her great black eyes and fixing them on the sky as if they stuck there, while my tongue goes flick-flack along, a hundred and fifty words a minute; then she looks at the clock; then she asks me what I've been reading."

"Ah, poor soul!" said granny. "No doubt she says in the morning, 'Would God it were evening,' and in the evening, 'Would God it were morning,' like the disobedient woman in Deuteronomy."

Swithin, in the room overhead, had suspended his calculations, for the duologue interested him. There now crunched heavier steps outside the door, and his grandmother could be heard greeting sundry local representatives of the bass and tenor voice, who lent a cheerful and well-known personality to the names Sammy Blore, Nat Chapman, Hezekiah Biles, and Haymoss Fry (the latter being one with whom the reader has already a distant acquaintance); besides these came small producers of treble, who had not yet developed into such distinctive units of society as to require particularizing."Is the good man come?" asked Nat Chapman. 
"No,--I see we be here afore him. And how is it with aged women to-night, Mrs. Martin?"
"Tedious traipsing enough with this one, Nat. Sit ye down. Well, little Freddy, you don't wish in the morning that 'twere evening, and at evening that 'twere morning again, do you, Freddy, trust ye for it?"
"Now, who might wish such a thing as that, Mrs Martin?--nobody in this parish?" asked Sammy Blore curiously.
"My lady is always wishing it," spoke up Miss Tabitha Lark.
"Oh, she! Nobody can be answerable for the wishes of that onnatural tribe of mankind. Not but that the woman's heart-strings is tried 

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