“What with hating us and hating her marriage and hating the new landlord with his jackanip’s airs, they quit her, nearly all her customers, and them as was faithful looked askance at her between the drinks. So she offs with her silks and on with her apron and up with her sleeves, and back to the kitchen! She’d been poor Jeff’s cook, you know, in the long, long ago, and ’twas her steak and kidney puddens and her gravies and sauces that he married, and now she was back at the old game. Whether ’twas partly to escape the sour looks that she burrowed in her kitchen or whether the whole thing was female artfulness I don’t pretend to say, but in two months she’d cooked ’em all back again. Don’t come in good time, you couldn’t get a chair at the ordinary for all the tips at Chipstone, and my boy, the postman, he told me he hears everybody joking over the rhubarb tart and saying as the Lord’s will is best. And she never come out o’ that kitchen till she’d cooked it all down.” It was during the dark interval that Jinny and Sister Mott _alias_ Mother Gander were first drawn together, the girl being summoned to the kitchen to receive instructions for such purchases from local tradesmen as the lady-hermit found indispensable yet dreaded to make in person. The fact that the little carrier was of the despised sect cemented the relationship. Jinny passed her midday respite in the warm kitchen, even sharing the cook’s meal. And when at last Sister Mott resumed her blue silk bodice and faced her tradesmen and her customers, new and old, the run of the kitchen and the freedom of the joint remained gratuitous to the lucky Jinny. Here under the great bacon-hung oak beams of the ancient apartment, before a huge fire mirroring itself rosily in the copper pans and skillets, she could sit thawing her toes beside the clanking smokejack, while the wind howled through the arch of the sleety courtyard. CHAPTER IV WILL ON HIS WAY _Permit me of these unknown lands t’inquire,_ _Lands never till’d, where thou hast wandering been,_ _And all the marvels thou hast heard and seen:_ _Do tell me something of the miseries felt_ _In climes where travellers freeze, and where they melt._ CRABBE, “Tales of the Hall.” I