“The visitor in question is a very excellent and respectable elderly lady, upright in mind and body, with a figure that does honour to her dancing master, and a face exceedingly well preserved.... She took us in the way from London to the West of England, and being, as she wrote, ‘not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no other guest might be admitted so that she might have the pleasure of our conversation all to herself’ (_Ours!_ as if it were possible for any of us to slide in a word edgewise!) ‘and especially enjoy the gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house, her countryman.’ Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept. All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago ... and ever since has she detailed with a minuteness ... which would excite the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch novelist. Her knowledge is astonishing.... It should seem to listen to her as if at some time of her life she must have listened herself; and yet her countryman declares ... no such event has occurred. “... Talking, sheer talking, is meat and drink and sleep to her. She likes nothing else. Eating is a sad interruption.... Walking exhausts the breath that might be better employed.... Allude to some anecdote of the neighbourhood, and she forthwith treats you with as many parallel passages as are to be found in an air with variations.... The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual register of hard frosts and long droughts and high winds and terrible storms, with all the evils that followed in their train and all the personal events connected with them.... By this time it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the chance of Mrs. Smith’s having set out for her daily walk, or the possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green’s new housemaid would come from London on the outside of the coach. [Illustration: WHERE THE CURATE LODGED]