After a hundred miles of dusty road, it is good to snuff the delicately salted air. The bight of the Exe, where we crossed it by steam launch, was only a make-believe for the sea. How wonderfully the slight rippling murmur of a calm sea flows into, and takes possession of one's mind. I stood by the shore and watched the boats, and was very peaceful. Then I went down the Gut to the house that I guessed was Anthony Widger's. Many children watched me with their eyes opened wide at my knapsack. A pleasant looking old woman--short, stout, charwoman-shaped--came out of the passage just as I raised my hand to knock the open door. "Are you Mrs Widger?" said I. "Lor' bless 'ee! I ben't Mrs Widger. Here, Annie! Here's a gen'leman to see 'ee." Mrs Widger, the afternoon Mrs Widger, is a quite slim woman who--strangely enough for a working man's wife--looks a good deal younger than she is. She has rather beautiful light brown hair and dresses tastefully. I am afraid she will not feel complimented if the old woman tells her of my mistake. Her manner of receiving me indicated plainly a suspended judgment, inclined perhaps towards the favourable. I was shown my room, a little long back room, with ragged wall-paper, and almost filled up by a huge, very flat, squashy bed. After a wash-over (I did not ask for a bath for fear of exposing the lack of one) I went down to tea. Bread, jam and cream were put before me, together with fairly good hot tea from a blue, smoky, enamelled tin teapot which holds any quantity up to a couple of quarts. Mrs Widger turned two guernseys, a hat, several odd socks, and a boot out of a great chintz-covered chair which lacked one of its arms. To my _made_ conversation she replied shortly: "Dear me!" "My!" "Did you ever...." She was taking stock of me. Presently she went to a cupboard, which is also the coal-hole, and brought out an immense frying-pan, black both inside and out. She heated it till the fat ran; wiped out it with a newspaper; then placed in it three split mackerel. "For Tony's tea," she explained. "He's to sea now with two gen'lemen, but I 'spect he'll be in house sune." Voices from the passage: "Mam! Tay! Mam, I wants my tay!" [Sidenote: _TEA-TIME_] A deeper voice: "Missis, wer's my tay? Got ort nice to eat?" It was Tony himself, accompanied by a small boy and a slightly larger small girl. "Hullo, sir! Yu'm come then. Do 'ee think you can put up wi' our little shanty? Missis ought to ha' laid for 'ee in the front room. Us got a little parlour, you know.--I be so wet as a drownded corpse, Missis!" The two children stood on the other side of the table, staring at me as if I were a wild beast behind bars which they scarcely trusted. "'Tis a gen'leman!" exclaimed the girl. "Coo'h!" the boy ejaculated. Tony turned on them with make-believe anger: "Why don' 'ee git yer tay? Don' 'ee know 'tis rude to stare?"