Grannie's reputation as a story-teller was readily acknowledged by the children of our village. When they had trudged back from school which was held in a village two miles away, tea was always ready for them. But tea in their own kitchens was accounted a dull repast. If the weather was fine they carried their "shives" of bread and dripping, or bread and treacle, into the road in front of their houses and ate them in the intervals between "Here come three dukes a-riding," "Wallflowers, wallflowers, growing up so high," and "Poor Roger is dead and laid in his grave." But in winter, or when the weather was bad, they made it their custom to take their teas to Grannie's fireside and demand a story as accompaniment to their frugal meal. The young voices of the children brightened Grannie's life, and the hour of story-telling round the fire was for her like a golden sunset following upon a day of gloom. The stories which she told to the children were usually concerned with her own childhood. She had always been of an imaginative turn of mind and the doings of her early life, seen through the long-drawn vistas of the years, had become suffused with iridescent colours. They had gathered to themselves romance as a wall overhung by trees gathers to itself moss and fern and lichen. "Tell you a tale," she would say. "Ay, but, honey-barns, I reckon you'll have heerd all my tales lang sin. No? Well then, did I iver tell you t' tale o' Janet's Cove?" "Ay, thou's telled us yon last week," Kester Laycock, the spokesman of the party of listeners, would reply; "but thou mun tell it agean." There was diplomacy as well as truth in Kester's words when he said that Grannie had told them the story of Janet's Cove the preceding week. The truth was that she had told them that tale every week since winter set in, but nothing could stale its freshness for them. Besides, did not Grannie introduce surprising variations of narrative every time she told it, so that it never seemed quite the same story?