This is what old Mrs. Wentworth says--the old lady so incredibly tenacious of life (incredibly as it seems to me at eighteen) as to have buried a husband and five strong sons, and yet still to eat her dinner with hearty relish, and laugh at any such jokes as are spoken loudly enough to reach her dulled ears. This is what she says, shaking the while her head, which--poor old soul--is already shaking a good deal involuntarily. I am sitting close beside her arm-chair, and have been reading aloud to her; but as I cannot succeed in pitching my voice so as to make her hear satisfactorily, by mutual consent the book has been dropped in my lap, and we have betaken ourselves to conversation. “I never said I disliked old women, did I?” reply I evasively, being too truthful altogether to deny the soft impeachment. “What makes you think I do? They are infinitely preferable to old men; I do distinctly dislike _them_.” “A fat, bald, deaf old woman,” continues she, not heeding me, and speaking with slow emphasis, while she raises one trembling hand to mark each unpleasant adjective; “if in the year ’2 any one had told me that I should have lived to be that, I think I should have killed them or myself! and yet now I am all three.” “You are not _very_ deaf,” say I politely--(the fatness and baldness admit of no civilities consistent with veracity)--but I raise my voice to pay the compliment. “In the year ’2 I was seventeen,” she says, wandering off into memory. “Yes, my dear, I am just fifteen years older than the century and _it_ is getting into its dotage, is not it? The year ’2--ah! I that was just about the time that I first saw my poor Bobby! Poor pretty Bobby.” “And who _was_ Bobby?” ask I, pricking up my ears, and scenting, with the keen nose of youth, a dead-love idyll; an idyll of which this poor old hill of unsteady flesh was the heroine. “I must have told you the tale a hundred times, have not I?” she asks, turning her old dim eyes towards me. “A curious tale, say what you will, and explain it how you will. I think I _must_ have told you; but indeed I forgot to whom I tell my old stories and to whom I do not. Well, my love, you must promise to stop me if you have heard it before, but to me, you know, these old things are so much clearer than the things of yesterday.” “You never told me, Mrs. Hamilton,” I say, and say truthfully; for being a new acquaintance I really have not been made acquainted with Bobby’s history. “Would you mind telling it me now, if you are sure that it would not bore you?” “Bobby,” she repeats softly to herself, “Bobby. I daresay you do not think it a very pretty name?” “N--not particularly,” reply I honestly. “To tell you the truth, it rather reminds me of a policeman.” “I daresay,” she answers quietly; “and yet in the year ’2 I grew to think it the handsomest, dearest name on earth. Well, if you like, I will begin at the beginning and tell you how that came about.”