“You might fare far before you came upon a better-favoured family. I was in the low, red-tiled kitchen; they were seated at their supper round a central table, the father, the mother, three sons, and the daughter Nancy. Amos Pennistan had the bearing, the gravity, and the beard of an apostle; I never saw a nobler looking man; he had his coat off, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt like a slash of blood. His sons, as they raised their heads to me from their bread and porridge, cast their eyes over my city-bred frame, much as calves in a field raise their heads to stare at the passer-by over the hedge, and I felt myself in the presence of young, indifferent animals. “An old, old woman was sitting over the fire. No mention of her had been made in our correspondence, nor did I then know who she was. Yet had it not been for her, and for the strange flame she had introduced into this English home, the story I am endeavouring to tell you might never have sprung up out of the grayness of commonplace. “The faintest smell floated about the room, and as I stood in slight bewilderment looking round I wondered what it could be; it was oddly familiar; it transported me, by one of those side-slips of the brain, away from England, and though the vision was too dim and transitory for me to crystallise it into a definite picture, I dreamed myself for a second in a narrow street between close, towering houses; yoked bullocks were there somewhere, and the clamour of a Latin city. I have gazed at a rainbow, and fancied I caught a violet ribbon between the red and the blue; gazed again, and it was gone; so with my present illusion. Then I saw that the old woman was fingering something by the fire, and in my interest I looked, and made out a row of chestnuts on the rail; one of them cracked and spat, falling on to the hearth, where she retrieved it with the tongs and set it on the rail again to roast. “The bullock-like sons took no notice of me beyond their first dispassionate glance, but Mrs. Pennistan in her buxom, and Amos in his reticent, fashion gave me an hospitable welcome. I was strongly conscious of the taciturn sons, who, after a grudging shuffle—a concession, I suppose, to my quality as a stranger—returned to their meal in uninterested silence. I was abashed by the contempt of the young men. It was a relief to me when one of them pushed aside his bowl and rose, saying, ‘I’ll be seeing to the cattle, father.’ “Amos replied, ‘Ay, do, and see to the window in the hovel; remember it’s shaky on the hinge.’ I had a sudden sense of intimacy: a day, a week, and I too should know the shaky hinge, the abiding place of tools, the peculiarities of the piggery.