Apropos of twins, another of the old ladies who was not otherwise interesting, a mournful body in black, with pink cotton wool in her ears which gave her head the appearance, seen hurriedly, of being hollow, boasted of having had "two couple of twins twice." This works out, if we are exact in the use of the word twin, to eight at a birth or sixteen in all. But she meant only that she had had four altogether. I congratulated her on her achievement, but she was apathetic about it. "Mrs. Nottidge," she said, "the wife of the landlord of the 'Jolly Bricklayers,' had triplets and got the Queen's bounty." The heroine of the twins, the Warden told us, liked to keep a bottle of gin, which was always referred to tactfully as medicine. It was supplied to her by a neighbouring lady who once sent a pound of tea in the same basket, and the gin bottle breaking, the tea was saturated. An ordinary person would merely have deplored a loss; but this recipient was more resourceful. She dried the tea in the oven and found it vastly improved for its drenching. That old women like a drop of something strong in the teacup, we all know; but here is possibly an idea for the tea trade which might enormously increase its profits. When consuming her gin in a more normal manner, Miss Mitt told us, the old lady always stirred it with a sprig of rue. It made it "healthier." At No. 8 was Martha Drax. Mrs. Drax was now nearing seventy, and all the time that she could spare from her household duties she devoted to meditating upon a letter to the King. Not that she was exactly mad--although this occupation might suggest it--but a little enfeebled in intellect, as indeed all poor old women have every right to be, considering what most of them go through in their long lives of penury and struggle; but in her case there was more than enough reason. Martha's story was this: As a girl in service she had become engaged to the son of the local baker. All had gone well until they took a day's holiday to visit a seaside resort, where he became wholly and dangerously intoxicated, and so terrified her that she broke off the match. He did all he could to win her again, but in vain; and after some years he married another girl from the same place, a big, strong creature who was cook to the doctor. They lived in the village, where the man worked as a gardener and attended the same chapel as Martha, who also had remained there, although only too eager to get away, tethered to it by an epileptic brother and bedridden mother, on whom she had to wait. At last the dislike of seeing the man and his wife together so told upon her that she left chapel and began to go to church; the man himself she avoided, exchanging the time of day with him when they met, but no more, and though not jealous of his wife, she intensely resented her.