’About 207, I should think, and it was "Our Lady of Ventre," Ross, who said that about the "hoperation." As long as it’s a quotation, a person can say anything and not be blamed.’ ’Your quotations always were about the limit,’ he answered, and went indoors again. A little later in the afternoon Ross was drumming idly on the drawing-room window when he suddenly exclaimed,— ’There are two visitors coming up the path, freaks, too, look at their clothes. My hat, Meg I it’s Aunt Amelia, Keziah, and the fydo!’ I don’t know if I said before that Keziah is tall and rather angular, with smooth black hair parted down the middle, like Aunt Amelia’s, and as the maid is always arrayed in her mistress’s cast-off clothes, one description will do for both. On this occasion each wore a funny little black bonnet, and a long voluminous broché skirt, the train of which was held right over the arm, showing acres of white embroidered petticoat. A black jacket, and square-toed, flat-heeled boots, and those awful stuff gloves that pull on without buttons completed an awe-inspiring costume. Keziah arranged my aunt in an arm-chair and handed over the fydo to her care, and then retired with my pulverised parlourmaid to the servants’ hall. Aunt Amelia was extremely gracious for her, in an early Victorian fashion, ’Hoped we liked our house and had found suitable domestic help.’ She then asked in the next breath, without waiting for my answers, what we thought of the church, and when I replied that we liked it very much she said,— ’I’m distressed to hear it, Margaret. It may be a beautiful structure, but do you know the vicar believes in the Virgin Mary?’ Ross got up hurriedly and opened another window, and then my amiable relative started on the family and her friends and proceeded to pick their religious views to pieces, while the fydo wheezed and stank and panted at her feet. I felt at all costs the conversation must be changed, so I told her rather irrelevantly that we kept chickens, but that we couldn’t have many as we hadn’t much space. ’Ah, Margaret,’ she said, ’if you want space you can always look above.’ ’But you can’t keep chickens there, Gweat Aunt,’ said the Gidger, who had been listening with great interest to the conversation. My brother looked at me piteously. I don’t know how much longer he could have controlled his laughter. Mercifully the fydo got fidgety, so the good lady got up to go. The Poppet observed with deep interest that the loose cover of the chair upon which the visitor had been sitting was all pulled out and wrinkled. She looked up at her great-aunt, and in a voice of the most intense interest, said,— ’Look how you’ve wuckled up the cover of muvver’s chair. You must be cowogated like our hen-house roof.’ Ross became so alarmingly faint that he could only gasp out a choked ’good-bye’ and hurry upstairs.