The guest of the widow Thwaytes was qualified in many ways to be that highly-respected personage’s confidential friend and favourite gossip. A widow indeed she was, forlorn and desolate by her own account, but comfortable withal in outward circumstances, and possessed of a portly person, and a complexion indicative of good cheer and inward content. Mrs. Tamfrey, for that was the relict’s name, had been left (like the congenial friend above named) with an only daughter to solace her declining years; and, after duly casting that young woman upon her own resources as a domestic servant, she--the widow of the deceased Mr. Tamfrey, a journeyman carpenter in a comfortable way of business--had entered upon the attractive career of a monthly nurse. In this lucrative profession she had met with marked and flattering success. Endowed with a low voice, a caressing manner, and a universal fund of anecdote, as well as considerable powers of invention, “Mrs. Tam,” as she was habitually called, made her way very successfully among the matrons, young and middle-aged, of the district; and over a cup of a “woman’s best restorer, balmy tea,” the widow Tamfrey was very generally allowed to be--during the pauses between her professional engagements--very excellent company. The room in which these well-suited friends had met for the purpose (not openly avowed, but nevertheless existent) to which I before alluded was a snug but not very spacious apartment running parallel with, and having easy access to, the shop. Miss Thwaytes, the widow’s only daughter, and a young person verging on forty, was occupied in the said shop--waiting upon customers and keeping up the credit of the establishment by civil speeches and oft-repeated remarks on the beauty of the weather and other such _banal_ topics of conversation. A wonderfully useful person in her way was Esther Thwaytes; a thorough woman of business, keen-eyed, calculating, and with only the very smallest of soft spots in the woman’s heart beating under her maidenly bosom. But there was yet another purpose besides that of business utility to which Miss Esther Thwaytes was daily put. With her the aged mother, who possessed but that one ewe lamb, was always indulging in, not sweet converse, gentle reader--not the interchange of soul with soul, nor the pleasant fellowship of congenial trencherwomen--but the inexhaustible enjoyment, the indescribable satisfaction of what we have heard described in five single letters as “words.” They were both--the daughter of forty and the parent of sixty-five--essentially “naggers.” The daily food of _snip-snap_, the eternal picking of bones, was as necessary to them as the air they breathed. Deprived of wholesome excitement, the lives of these two women would have been horribly flat and uninteresting; a _vis inertiæ_, despite the busy shop, the cheering tea-drinkings, and the friendly intercourse with that unfailing gossip Mrs. Tamfrey, the monthly nurse of Switcham.