And certainly a peculiar change _had_ taken place in Major Oldschool’s deportment in general, and to his housekeeper in particular. Do what she might, there was no pleasing him. For a long time, Mrs. Coddle speculated as to the cause of the alteration of the gentleman’s conduct towards her. At first, with a true nurse’s discrimination, she had been inclined to refer his ill-temper to what she termed the bad state of his “digester,” being convinced that his stomach rather than his head was deranged, and felt satisfied it was all owing to his having left off his nightly brace of “Cockles.” Accordingly, she provided him with a miniature bandbox of the best antibilious, and endeavoured to persuade him to swallow a double allowance of the tiny medicinal dumplings—but all to no avail. Then she felt certain it must be the nasty rheumatiz flying about him, for he’d been and got his blood chilled the evening he went to the station-’us, she knew, cause, on taking his shoe off that night, she had found his sock was quite damp, and the cold must have struck in’ards; so she made him tureensful of white wine whey and treacle-posset, and hot milk and suet, but he would not touch a thimbleful, as she said, of any of them, vowing he never was better in all his life. At length, however, Mrs. Coddle communicated in confidence to Mrs. Fokesell that she had that morning discovered the cause of all her Major’s tantrums of late, for, on examining the bottom of her teacup at breakfast that day, she had seen a wedding among the grouts as plain as she had ever seed any think in all her life; and what was more, so as to satisfy herself that she couldn’t be mistaken, she had took the trouble to burn a letter, and watch the sparks among the ashes, and there was the parson and the clerk a-going one after the other, for all the world as if they had been right afore her; and so, she said, putting this and that, and a many other things together, Mrs. Fokesell might take her word for it that there would be a wedding in that very house afore the twelvemonth was over. Mrs. Fokesell shook her head, and remarked that there was no going agin such things, and that she too remembered of dreaming three times running of tumbling into a bed of nettles, and that meant marriage all the world over—adding, that _her_ Fokesell was going to sea again directly, and there was no telling what might happen afore the year was out. But Mrs. Coddle had, as she observed, her eye on a very different party, and all she would then say was, “that there was no fools like _old_ fools,” and she laid a most significant emphasis on that part of the proverb which refers to the age of the simpletons.