"So the stick," she continues, "reappeared in the hall, and, from some whim which I have never rightly understood myself, I, who had no more need of such a supporter than the youngest woman in the parish--who was, indeed, the best walker of my years for a dozen miles round, and piqued myself not a little upon so being--took a fancy to use this stick in my own proper person, and most pertinaciously carried this fancy into execution. Much was I laughed at for this crotchet, and I laughed too. Friends questioned, strangers stared; but, impassive to stare or to question, I remained constant to my supporter. Except when I went to London, (for I paid so much homage to public opinion as to avoid such a display _there_,) I should as soon have thought of walking out without my bonnet as without my stick. That stick was my inseparable companion." The staff had met with its share of misadventures and accidents; "one misfortune, so to say personal, which befel it, was the loss of its own head;" but its loss from the pony-chaise, its fall from the chaise into a brook which had been passed through the day before, is the especial calamity here celebrated. By this time we learn with regret that the stick has become more than a whim--has grown into a useful and necessary friend:-- "I might have observed that something was amiss in our small household; that Sarah answered the bell, and that the hemmer of flounces, when she did appear, seemed flurried and fatigued. But I was thinking of Sir Philip Sydney, of the _Defence of Poetry_, of the _Arcadia_, and of my own resolution to proceed to the green lane, and to dissect that famous pastoral, and select from the mass, which even to myself I hardly confessed to be ponderous, such pages as might suit an age that by no means partakes of my taste for folios. So I said to her, 'That the afternoon being cool, and I less lame than usual, I thought we should not need Sam and the pony-chaise, but that I could manage by the help of my stick.'