Mrs Lower made a very comfortable widow--one whose hostelry was much frequented by commercial gentlemen, and those given to running down from town once or twice a week for the purpose of having a turn with the Low Wold hounds; stout, as a matter of course, for no woman could be expected to make a good landlady who was angular or pointed in her person. Mrs Lower was stout, but not uncomfortably so, and this stoutness she kept in its proper proportion by a comfortable diet, and by being a woman without one of those unpleasant parasites known as cares. Doubtless she had plenty of the little troubles of life to encounter--those little three-cornered affairs that bother everyone-- matters that to some people would be cares; but in her case, being a mild, cheerful, and amiable woman, they made but little impression, the consequence being that these acidities of life never ate into her countenance, running down it in wrinkles, and puckers, and channels; and at an age one never dare mention in her presence, or out of it either, for fear of not being believed, she was plump of face, rosy, and comfortable-looking, to an extent that made more than one well-to-do farmer, and tradesman too, make her an offer that she would not accept. Mrs Lower sat very comfortably enjoying her breakfast in the bar of the County Arms, which bar was a pleasant-looking glass bower, with a view one way of the sawdusty passage leading out into the market-place, and in the other direction a prospect of divers pendent articles of consumption--to wit, a turkey, joints of mutton and beef, poultry, and a couple of long-tailed pheasants. There was a cozy air about Mrs Lower's bar, for everything in it looked snug, from the big-stomached bottles to the great tom-cat blinking on the hearth-rug. No fireplace ever shone to such an extent as Mrs Lower's, for it was a very race between black-lead and flame which should glow most, the result being a warm combination, in which the fender, copper tea-kettle, and fire-irons joined, and which every bottle, glass, and object with shine in its composition laughed over and reflected. Everything in Mrs Lower's cozy bar seemed in keeping, and as if belonging to it--beginning with the principal object animate, Mrs Lower herself, and descending through the blind, fat spaniel and the black, blinking tom-cat, to the stout bullfinch in the cage hung in the window--a finch so fat that he very seldom hopped, while there was a general aspect about him that his feather jacket was too tight, for it never seemed smooth. There was a tradition that this bullfinch used to pipe "God save the King;" but that when William the Fourth died, he went into mourning for him, and had never opened his beak to honour the successor. True or not, Mrs Lower believed it; and at all events, if people doubted the bird's age, she could declare the part of the story to be true which related to its never opening its beak to pipe the anthem in its altered form.