"Mrs. Lister always took 'the bile' when anything was expected of her. Once a year we were invited to tea at the Listers' house, and as sure as we found ourselves seated before a table groaning with bake-meats and were being pressed by Mr. Lister to partake of them because they were all baked by 'Mamaw,' Mrs. Lister would say, 'Ay, and I had a job baking them--for I was bad with "the bile" all morning.' As Marget says, 'The mistress is awfu' easy scunnered,' and after hearing that my tea was a pretence. It was worse when Agatha was there, for then we were apt to wait for the announcement, and when it came give way to painful, secret laughter. Agatha always laughed, too, when Mrs. Lister capped her husband's sayings with 'Ay, that's it, Paw.' She was a most agreeable wife, but she was a mother before everything. She would have talked all day about her children, bursting out with odd little disjointed confidences about them in the middle of a conversation about something else. 'He's an awful nice boy, Johnnie; he's got a fine voice,' would occur in a conversation about the Sustentation Fund, and in the middle of a discussion about a series of lectures she would whisper, 'He's a queer laddie, our Tommy. When Nettie was born he put his head round my bedroom door and said, "Is she a richt ane, Maw?" He meant not deaf or dumb or anything, you know.' She sometimes irritated her husband by her overanxiety about the health of her children. If one coughed in the night she always heard and, fearful of waking Mr. Lister, she would creep out of bed and jump from mat to mat (I can see her doing it--a sort of anxious little antelope), and listen to their breathing, and hap them up with extra bedclothes. Nettie was the youngest, and the delicate one, and had to be tempted to eat. 'Oh, ma Nettie,' she would say, 'could you take a taste of haddie to your tea or a new-laid egg?' "She was afraid of nearly everything--mice, and wind, and thunder, and she hated the sea. One morning I met her almost distraught because her boys had all gone out in a boat. 'Is their father with them?' I asked. 'No, no,' she said, 'I didna let him go; it was just the more to drown.' Poor, anxious little body! God took her first, and she never had the anguish of parting with her children.... What an opportunity ministers and ministers' wives have of getting to know people as they are--their very hearts!"