And if I keep my eyes tightly shut and the eyes of memory open, I can see as I sit stroking Miss Blinkett's cat the legs of the new Vicar pass up the lane outlined against a lilac skirt. And Miss Amy, who is not a close observer of life, opines that the skirt belongs to Miss Janey Manvers, but Miss Blinkett senior instantly identifies it as Annette's new spotted muslin, which she had seen Mrs. Nicholls "getting up" last week. But that was twenty years ago. I can only tell you what Riff was like then, for it is twenty years since I was there, and I am not going there any more, for I don't want to see any of the changes which time must have wrought there, and if I walked down the village street now I should feel like a ghost, for only a few of the old people would remember me. And the bright-eyed, tow-headed little lads whom I taught in Sunday school are scattered to the four winds of heaven. The Boer War took some of them, and London has engulfed more, only a few remaining at Riff as sad-looking middle-aged men, farm hands, and hedgers and ditchers, and cowmen. And I hear that now the motors go banging along the Yarmouth high road day and night, and that Riff actually has a telegraph office of its own and that the wires go in front of The Hermitage, only the Miss Blinketts are not there to see it. A literary lady lives there now, and I hear she has changed the name to "Quill Cottage," and has made a garden in the orchard where old Nan's cottage was by the twisted pear tree: old Nan the witch, who grew mistletoe in all the trees in her domain, and cured St. Vitus' dance with it. No, I will not go to Riff any more, for I do not want to see any of these things, and least of all the literary lady who is writing her novels in the quiet rooms where my two old friends knitted and read Thomas à Kempis.