“No news is good news, dear heart,” Caleb put in, as though to shield the postman. He was not so sure now that this unfortunate letter had not disturbed her slowly won resignation. “We’ve always yeared of anything unpleasant—like when Daniel married the Kaffir lady.” “That was Christopher,” said Martha. “Ow, ay, Christopher. ’Tis a wonder he could take to a thick-lipped lady. Oi couldn’t fancy a black-skinned woman, even if she was the Queen of Sheba. Oi shook hands with one once, though, and it felt soft. They rub theirselves with oil to keep theirselves lithe.” Martha replied only with a sigh. The Kaffir lady, for all her coloured and heathen horror, at least supplied a nucleus for visualization, whereas all her other stalwart sons, together with one married daughter, had vanished into the four corners of the Empire—building it up with an unconsciousness mightier than the sword—and only the children who had died young—two girls and a boy—remained securely hers, fixed against the flux of life and adventure. Occasionally indeed an indirect rumour of her live sons’ doings came to her, but correspondence was not the habit of those days when even amid the wealthier classes a boy might go out to India and his safe arrival remain unknown for a semestrium or more. The foreign postage, too, was no inconsiderable check to the literary impulse or encouragement to the lazy. Indeed postage stamps were still confined to half a dozen countries. It was but a decade since they had come in at all and letters with envelopes or an extra sheet had ceased to be “double”; postcards were still unknown, and in many parts postmen came as infrequently as carriers, people often hastening to scrawl replies which the same men might convey to the mail-bags. “Kaffirs ain’t black,” corrected Bundock. “They’re coffee-coloured. That’s what the name means.” Martha sighed again. So far had her brooding fantasy gone that she sometimes pictured baby grandchildren as innocently dusky as the hybrid young fantails which no solicitude could keep out of her dovecot, and which were a reminder that heaven knew no colour-boundaries. “Don’t be nervous,” Bundock reassured her. “I’ll find it.” “Oh, no hurry, no hurry!” said Caleb, beginning to perspire distressingly under the postman’s exertions and to mop his hairy brow with his brook-sopped handkerchief. How these youngsters grew up! he was thinking. Brats one had seen spanked waxed into mighty officers of State. “Shall I brush your breeches, Posty?” he inquired tactlessly. “What’s the use till they’re dry?” snapped Bundock. “Come in and dry them before the kitchen fire,” said Martha. “This sun’ll dry them,” he said coldly. “Not so slick as the fire,” Caleb blundered on. “’Tain’t like you was a serpent walking on your belly.” Bundock flushed angrily and right-wheeled to hide the seat of his trousers. “Why you should go and catch your letter when the roads are in that state——!” he muttered.