"So there they all was, the biling of 'em," said Jim. "And there was Daddy, he'd got himself under a cart, and was a bit the worse by it. And his little lass, she come and kissed him, for to cheer him up--hay, lassie? Nor never cried, nor made no noise, like he told her not to." Lizarann felt proud and happy. But she could not endure a position with the slightest false pretence in it. "I _did_ cried, too," she said, "when I got so far as Dartley Street. And the boy, he says not to water-cart." "The Young Varmint?" "Yass! He toldited me his nime, he did. Hawkins--Frederick--Hawkins." Lizarann gives the exact words the boy had said. "And he says not to water-cart because of his aunt and uncle. Took to the Sospital quite flat they was, and begun singing a fortnight after!" Jim made concession to the Young Varmint--went so far as to say that he would not warm his hide for him this time, pr'aps! But he spoke without confidence of the like abstention being justified in the future. "And then the lassie come home," said he. "And who come to the door?" "Only me, Daddy!" "Ah!--but t'other side--who come?" "Uncle Bob didn't come to the door, only he set it just on the jar for me to push." Clearly "coming to a door" involves opening it wide for friends, or conferring with strangers to learn their reason for knocking or ringing. He who takes letters from a letter-box does not go to the door, even if he rushes downstairs like a madman when the postman's knock comes. You may be sure that Lizarann's narrative that followed was full of little niceties of language, as spoken in Tallack Street. But you have had all the substance, and it need not be repeated in a new form. Jim interspersed the story of the suppression of his delirious brother-in-law with exclamations of applause. Lizarann deserved what the players call "a hand" now and again for the vivacity of her descriptive report of the knife scene, with its dramatic ending of the application of the spent lucifer-match to Uncle Bob's hand. "He just give one scroatch, and there he was!" The introduction of a new self-explanatory word into the language alone deserved recognition. But Jim was not concerned with this. The conduct of Athelstan Taylor in a difficult position took his attention off minor points. "I could have named the sart of man he was," said he, speaking half to himself, "from the feel of his hand, and maybe no more than just a 'Good-marning, mate!' by the way. And--but to think of it!--him a _parson_!" Jim couldn't get over this at all. He dwelt on the unfitness of the arrangement: "Now, if they'd 'a made pore Bob a parson, it might 'a broke him of his habit, and we'd not have had a bad miss of him on our side." He seemed to go on thinking of the subject in all its aspects--possibly of the utilization of ecclesiastical preferments as an antidote to drunkenness. But his fingers kept wandering about his little girl's face and head, as if to detect the change eight weeks had made in it.