We need not peer in through the window at the Shakespeare Calendar on Aunt Maria's study table to see what time of year it is, for everything tells us: the masses of white pinks crowding up to the threshold and laying their sweet heads against the stone edging of their domain, the yellow lichen in flower on the roof, the serried ranks of Sweet William full out. It is certainly early June. And the black-faced sheep moving sedately in the long meadows in front of the house confirm us in our opinion, for they have shed their becoming woollen overalls and are straddling about, hideous to behold, in their summer tights. Only the lambs, now large and sedate, keep their pretty February coats, though by some unaccountable fatality they have all, poor dears, lost their tails. Lowshire is a sedate place. I have never seen those solemn Lowshire lambs jump about as they do in Hampshire. A Hampshire lamb among his contemporaries with the juice of the young grass in him! Hi! Friskings and caperings! That is a sight to make an old ram young. But the Lowshire lambs seem ever to see the shadow of the blue-coated butcher in the sunshine. They move in decorous bands as if they were going to church, hastening suddenly all together as if they were late. Lowshire is a sedate place. The farm lads still in their teens move as slowly as the creeping rivers, much slower than the barges. The boys early leave off scurrying in shouting bands down the lanes in the dusk. The little girls peep demurely over the garden gates, and walk slowly indoors, if spoken to. We have ascertained that it is early June, and we need no watch to tell us what o'clock it is. It is milking-time, the hour when good little boys "whom mother can trust" are to be seen hurrying in an important manner with milk-cans. Half-past four it must be, for the red cows, sweet-breathed and soft-paced, have passed up the lane half an hour ago, looking gently to right and left with lustrous, nunlike eyes, now and then putting out a large red tongue to lick at the hedgerow. Sometimes, as to-day, the bull precedes them, hustling along, surly, _affairé_, making a low, continuous grunting which is not anger, for he is kind as bulls go, so much as "orkardness," the desire of the egotist to make his discontentment public, and his disillusionment with his pasture and all his gentle-tempered wives. Annette came down the carved staircase, and stood a moment in the doorway in a pale lilac gown (the same that you will remember the Miss Blinketts saw half an hour later). Her ear caught the sound of a manly voice mingled with Aunt Maria's dignified tones, and the somewhat agitated accompaniment of the clink of tea-things. Aunt Harriet was evidently more acutely undecided than usual which cup to fill first, and was rattling them in the way that always irritated Aunt Maria, though she made heroic efforts to dissimulate it.