So they weren't particularly happy in the first rooms we took, at a farm just out of Whitby. There was one stuffy little best parlour, sealed up like a bottle of medecine, and one mouldy geranium looking as if it couldn't help it on the window-sill, and the "Seven Deadly Sins" in chromo on the walls, and Rebecca at a well of Berlin wools over the mantelpiece. They covered the family Bible with an antimacassar, and Aunt Gerty's theatrical photos without which she never travels, and suppressed the frosty ornament in a glass case of one of Mrs. Wilson's wedding-cakes. Mrs. Wilson married early, she says, and I say she married often, for there are three of them! It _was_ uncomfortable. Mother didn't complain, Aunt Gerty did. She had nowhere to hang up her dresses; they were all getting spoilt; she couldn't see to do her hair in the wretched little scrap of looking-glass, and the room was so small that she twice set fire to her bed-curtains, curling her hair, which she did twenty times a day, for there was always wind or rain or something. The walls were so thin that she could hear every word Mr. and Mrs. Wilson said to each other in the next room, quarrelling and arranging the bill and so on. She couldn't sleep with the window shut, and all sorts of horrid buggy things came in if you left it open. It was so dreadfully lonely here, and she had never "seen so much land" in her life. Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she won't think of grumbling. The landlady didn't consider us a particularly good "let." I used to hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a railway porter, how glad she would be to be "shot" of us if it wasn't for the money. "Ay, lass!" he would answer, and then I used to hear him turning over in bed and going to sleep again. "They're better to keep a week than a fortnight!" she used to say. "What with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee, and all sitting down for an hour o' mornings polishing up them ondacent brown boots--they darsen't trust the help, no, not since she went and rubbed them with lard--poor girl, she meant well,--and she fit to rive her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!"