“Ah, the in-and-out cottage! the dear, dear home!... No changes there! except that the white kitten who sits purring at the window under the great myrtle has succeeded to his lamented grandfather, our beautiful Persian cat. I cannot find an alteration. To be sure, yesterday evening a slight misfortune happened to our goodly tenement, occasioned by the unlucky diligence which, under the conduct of a sleepy coachman and a restive horse, contrived to knock down and demolish the wall of our court, and fairly to drive through the front garden, thereby destroying sundry curious stocks, carnations and geraniums. It is a mercy that the unruly steed was content with battering the wall.... There was quite din enough without any addition. The three insides (ladies) squalling from the interior of that commodious vehicle; the outsides (gentlemen) swearing on the roof; the coachman still half asleep, but unconsciously blowing his horn; we in the house screaming and scolding; the passers-by shouting and hallooing; May, who little brooked such an invasion of her territories, barking in her tremendous lion note, and putting down the other noises like a clap of thunder. The passengers, coachman, horses and spectators all righted at last, and no harm done but to my flowers and to the wall. May, however, stands bewailing the ruins, for that low wall was her favourite haunt; she used to parade backwards and forwards on the top of it as if to show herself, just after the manner of a peacock on the top of a house. But the wall is to be rebuilt to-morrow with old weather-stained bricks—no patchwork! exactly in the same form; May herself will not find out the difference, so that in the way of alteration this little misfortune will pass for nothing. Neither have we any improvements worth calling such, except that the wheeler’s green door has been retouched out of the same pot (as I judge from the tint) with which he furbished up our new-old pony-chaise; that the shop window of our neighbour, the universal dealer Bromley’s, hath been beautified, and his name and calling splendidly set forth in yellow letters on a black ground; and that our landlord of the ‘Rose’ has hoisted a new sign of unparalleled splendour.” Miss Mitford happened to possess an “historic staff” which she greatly valued, and which had been handed down from one relative to another from its former owner—that Duchess of Athol and Lady of Man of whom mention has been made in an earlier chapter. At the period we are writing of Miss Mitford used the staff rather as an ornament than otherwise, being then, as she says, “the best walker of her years for a dozen miles round”; but in later life she was glad of its support. “Now this staff,” she writes, “one of the oldest friends I have in the world, is pretty nearly as well known as myself in our Berkshire village.”