Aggie Wilkinson was there looking now almost as old as Mrs. Pottage and in some respects a good deal older, though she was still alluded to by her mistress as if she were in short skirts. “Pore little thing, it does her good to get about a bit on those crutches of hers. She likes a jollification as much as I do myself. She’s been helping me with the birthday cake, and which I don’t mind telling you is a proper mammoth and no mistake. It ’ud make Mong Blong look like a fourpenny lemon-ice.” Mrs. Bugbird was there, and Nancy thought that she too looked a proper mammoth, so much fatter had she grown with the years. “It’s to be a nice cosy little party,” Mrs. Pottage announced. “In fact we’re all here now except one.” With this she winked at Mrs. Bugbird, who shook with her accustomed laughter, though she was now so immense that she could scarcely fall off any chair, and not very easily fall off a sofa. Nancy gratified her hostess by displaying a great deal of curiosity about the missing guest. “He’s my one and only left,” Mrs. Pottage said. “No, I’m joking. He isn’t what you’d call a suitor at all. In fact, he wouldn’t suit anybody. He’s just a nice quiet old fellow called Hayhoe who likes to pop in of a evening and smoke his pipe in my kitchen. He’s been in Australia all his life, and when he come home again he found all his friends and relations was dead and buried. So the pore old boy’s a bit lonely, and he enjoys himself telling the tale to me about Australia, and which seems to me from what I can make out of it a much larger place than what you’d think. And on Sunday to pass the time he blows the organ. He says that’s the only way he can go to church without missing his pipe, though whether because the organ has pipes and to spare or because he’s for ever puffing at the bellows I never could rightly make out. He’s entertained Mrs. B. and I a lot this last winter, and he’s very handy with a hammer and nails. In fact, we call him the jumping kangaroo among ourselves. Hush, here he comes.” Perhaps Mr. Hayhoe was abashed by the presence of a stranger, for he certainly did not jump about at all that afternoon, but sat small and silent in a corner of Mrs. Pottage’s room until he was called upon to help cut the cake, which he did with the air of performing a surgical operation. “Well, I shall certainly do my best to live a bit longer,” Mrs. Pottage declared when she was responding to the good wishes of her guests, “for the longer I live, the more I enjoy myself. Oh, dear, I do wish I’d have been a month or two younger though, and then Letitsia could have been with us this afternoon. She _has_ been away a time. Talk about Brussels sprouts, she _will_ be a Brussels sprout by now, and no mistake. You mark my words, Mrs. Bugbird, that child’ll come home a walking maypole.”