Little did I foresee what sleeping in the front bedroom means. Tony's sister gave birth to a boy about ten o'clock. On hearing that everything was as it should be, I went to bed, but, alack! not to sleep. For the subdued chatter grew into an uproar which continued till fully midnight. All the women in the neighbourhood seemed to have come this way; and they meg-megged, and they laughed, and when their children awoke they shouted up at the windows from outside. I heard snatches of childbearing adventures, astonishing yarns, interspersed with hard commonsense, not to say cynicism--the cynicism of people who cannot afford to embroider much the bare facts of existence or to turn their attention far from the necessities of life. "Her'll be weak," one woman said, "an' for a long time--never so strong as her was before. 'Tis always worse after each one you has, 'cepting the first, which is worst of all, I say. But there, her must take it as it comes...." Sundry other bits of good practical philosophy I perforce listened to; and at last, when everybody had turned in (I imagined their pleasant lightheadedness as they snuggled under the bedclothes in the stuffy cottage rooms--the witticisms and echoes of laughter that were running through their heads); when, I say, everybody had turned in, an offended dog in the hotel yard began to howl. If it were not that the window of the back bedroom is over the scullery, the ash-heap and the main drain, I would ask to move back there. In Under Town a birth makes the stir that is due to such a stupendous event. 4 [Sidenote: _THE KITCHEN_] The Widger's kitchen is an extraordinary room--fit shrine for that household symbol, the big enamelled tin teapot. At the NW. corner is the door to the scullery and to the small walled-in garden which contains--in order of importance--flotsam and jetsam for firewood, old masts, spars and rudders, and some weedy, grub-eaten vegetables. At the top of the garden is a tumble-down cat-haunted linhay, crammed to its leaky roof with fishing gear. No doubt it is the presence everywhere of boat and fishing gear which gives such a singular unity to the whole place. The kitchen is not a very light room: its low small-paned window is in the N. wall. Then, going round the room, the courting chair stands in the NE. corner, below some shelves laden with fancy china and souvenirs--and tackle. The kitchener, which opens out into quite a comforting fireplace, is let into the E. wall, and close beside it is the provision cupboard, so situated that the cockroaches, having ample food and warmth, shall wax fat and multiply. Next, behind a low dirty door in the S. wall, is the coalhole, then the high dresser, and then the door to the narrow front passage, beneath the ceiling of which are lodged masts, spars and sails. The W. wall of the kitchen is decorated with Tony's Oddfellow 'cistificate,' with old almanacs and with a number of small pictures, all more or less askew.