But it was a house bare and barren in its small space, as the great ward of a poor-house, while it was liable to the squalor the absence of which is the redeeming feature of the poor-house. Here there was not one of the articles which are the pride of a well-to-do ploughman’s heart, and which make all the difference between ‘couthiness’ (plenty and comfort combined) and dreariness in his homely dwelling. In Bob’s house there was no chest of drawers rubbed by proud patient hands--such as Jean had been once laying by ten shillings of her wages at a time to buy; no grandiose eight-day clock with perhaps a wreath of brilliant pink roses and gorgeous blue convolvuluses painted round its broad face, to which Bob in the heyday of his fortunes had aspired; no coarse but gay earthenware, for show as well as for use, in the cupboard with its glass door; no resplendent coloured engravings of worse than doubtful merit as works of art, but bright suggestive spots relieving the staring or dingy blankness of the white-washed walls; no exquisitely patched quilt--a marvel of womanly ingenuity and industry, such as Jean had once stitched together and sung over, and laid aside to fade in her kist--adorning the box-bed. There was not even a cat purring about the ‘clean hearth-stane,’ or a bird chirping in its cage, or a growing plant on the ledge of the small window. Yet Bob as a young man had been fond of animals and plants. Only there had been hard times in his history. Then a cat, if it did not cast aside its domestic habits and run wild about the stack-yard and barn, killing rats and mice which Bob might have been tempted to grudge it, for its own consumption, would have grown as lean in flesh and as unthrifty in coat as Bob himself. The pence to be paid for an ounce of bird-seed might have formed a far larger sum than he, with any conscience, would have dared to abstract from the family capital. The burdened man could not have given the moment’s thought and time necessary to supply the ‘flooer’ with the common sunshine, air, and water--all that it craved. Jean, who had been thinking much of late of her old comfortable manse-kitchen glittering with pewter, tin and brass, the very roof groaning with the weight of mutton hams, pigs’ cheeks, dried fish, bags of onions, bunches of herbs, contrasted it with this region of desolation, but did not shrink from the contrast. Jean and Bob chatted together one on each side of the flickering fire--the blinking of which was more kindly than the pale February sunbeams, which shone steadily on the dispiriting house-place.