of the weather. If we have passed a long wet day indoors I feel that it is going to be a Jamieson day, and I know that my sister will say to me after tea, "Suppose we go over and see the Jamiesons;" and she generally adds that it is much better than settling down for the evening at five o'clock in the afternoon. 

 I do not think that Palestrina was so sociable a young woman, nor did she see so much of her neighbours, before I came home an invalid from South Africa—I got hit in the legs at Magersfontein, and had the left one taken off in the hospital at Wynberg—but she believes, no doubt rightly, that the variety that one gets by seeing one's fellow-men is good for a poor lame dog who lies on a sofa by the fire the greater part of the day, wishing he could grow another leg or feel fit again. 

 Acting upon this unalterable conviction of my sister, we drive about in the afternoon and see people, and they come and see me and suggest occupations for me. In Lent I had a more than usual number of callers, which says much for the piety of the place, as well as for the goodness of heart of its inhabitants. 

 There is a slight coolness between what is known as the "County" and the Jamiesons, and their name is never mentioned without the accompanying piece of information, "You know, old Jamieson married his cook!"  To be more exact, Mrs. Jamieson was a small farmer's daughter, and Captain Jamieson fell in love with her when, having left the army, he went to learn practical farming at old Higgins's, and he loved her faithfully to the day of his death. She is a stout, elderly woman who speaks very little, but upon whom an immense amount of affection seems to be lavished by her family of five daughters and two sons. And it has sometimes seemed to my sister and me that her good qualities are of a lasting and passive sort, which exist in large measure in the hearts of those who bestow this boundless affection. Mrs. Jamieson's form of introducing herself to any one she meets consists in giving an account of the last illness and death of her husband. There is hardly a poultice which was placed upon that poor man which her friends have not heard about. And when she has finished, in her flat, sad voice, giving every detail of his last disorder, Mrs. Jamieson's conversation is at an end. She has learned, no doubt unconsciously, to gauge the characters of new acquaintances by the degree of interest which they evince in Captain Jamieson's demise. It is Mrs. Jamieson's test of their true worth. 

 Of the other sorrow which saddened a nature that perhaps was never very 

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