At last they decided to take him to a hospital; so her sister-in-law and “his” mother went with her. And what do you think the doctor said, after they’d told him the symptoms? “Temper,” he says; “just bad temper. Take him home, and spank him next time it comes on.” And that was all they got!—cost them fivepence each for car-fares too! We asked after her own family. Maudie was getting on splendidly at school, “really a first-class scholard she is, although it’s I that say it. Can read the Bible beautifully now—or at any rate the Testament” (with a desire to be absolutely truthful). “And when I’m writing to her father, and can’t quite rec’lect how to spell a word, she can tell me two or three different ways of spelling it, right off pat!” At the next cottage we stopped to inquire after a man who had met with an accident, which necessitated the amputation of one leg below the knee. Having given him all our own “Surgical Aid” letters, and fleeced our friends of theirs, I naturally asked why he wasn’t wearing the artificial limb that had been procured? (it was reposing artistically on the top of the chest of drawers in the kitchen, a stuffed sea-gull under a glass shade on one side, balanced by a wedding-cake-top-ornament under glass on the other). Wasn’t it comfortable? I asked. Didn’t it fit? “Oh, yes’m, thank you; it fits beautiful. But that’s my _best_ leg; and the missus likes me to keep it there where she can show it to everyone, and I only uses it for Sundays and Bank ’Ollerdis.” Then we looked in on Mrs. Granger, a happy-go-lucky widow who is always passing round the hat. When we knocked at the kitchen door, she was pouring down the sink the liquor in which she had just boiled a piece of bacon. I couldn’t help asking mildly and deferentially: “Have you ever tried using the liquor of boiled bacon for making pea-soup? It’s very nourishing, as well as tasty.” Mrs. Granger smiled at me indulgently. “Well, ma’am, seeing that I’ve buried two husbands and three children, no one, I fancy, can give _me_ points about feeding a family!” At Mrs. Jones’s we made a longer call; we simply had to, as we were wanting milk, and she made no move to get it, but merely stood talking. There was the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, she particularly wanted us to see that. Arundel Jones (aged eleven) had smashed a hole right through the glass when practising bomb-throwing in there. But would you ever know it, the way Patricia (aged seventeen) had decorated it? And as we couldn’t think what to say, we looked long and earnestly at the bunch of artificial and rather faded roses from Patricia’s hat that had been stuck in the hole, with some green paint daubed around on the glass to represent leaves. Fortunately, Mrs. Jones didn’t wait for our opinion—took it for granted, indeed, since there could only be one opinion about such a masterpiece—and proceeded to ask what I thought could be done with so artistic a girl.