"Like old Mary Hart at Etterick, when a visitor said to her, 'What a lovely view you have!' 'An' what aboot it?' was the disconcerting answer. I remember the Dewars' manse, Mother. I once stayed there for a week. What a pity Mrs. Dewar had no children of her own! She was a wonder with children. I was only a tiny child, but she taught me so much, and interested me in so many different things and people. After breakfast I had to help her to 'classify' the dishes; put all the spoons together, and wipe the knives with soft paper and make them all ready to be washed. Then we saw that the salts and mustards were tidy, and the butter and jam in dainty dishes. Then we would take a bundle of American papers to a woman who had a son in the United States, and on our way home she would take me down to the shore and point out the exact spot on the rocks where she had once found a beautiful coral comb, and where the next day she had found a mermaid sitting crying for the loss of it. It was a long story, but I know it finished with the grateful mermaid giving a large donation to the Sustentation Fund! Mrs. Dewar had an extraordinary number of relations, who all seemed to be generals and admirals, and things like that, and the tales of the Indian nephews who had come to her as babies were enthralling to me. They were grown up by that time, and, I suppose, on their way to become generals, too. There was always something rather military about Mrs. Dewar's small, alert figure. 'Mustard to mutton,' she would say to me at dinner; 'child, you would be expelled from the mess.' She was really too funny. When Mr. Dewar would say, 'My dear, have you seen my spectacles?' she would reply, 'Seek and ye shall find, not speak and ye shall find.' And if the servants worried her she walked about saying the hymn beginning, 'Calm me, O God, and keep me calm.'" "I likit Mrs. Dewar," said Marget; "she had queer ways, but she was a leddy. She was yin o' the Keiths o' Rathnay--rale gentry. Eh, Mem, d'ye mind the black that was preachin' for Maister Dewar, an' they couldna keep him in the hoose, for there was illness, and he cam' to us? Eh, I say!" "Poor man! I remember your face, Marget, when I met you on the stairs the morning he left. You were holding some towels away from you and you said, 'I'm no verra sure aboot that black's towels.'" "Neither I wis," said Marget; "I'm aye feared the black comes off." CHAPTER X