—“The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four weeks”—said Eleanor, thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper. “Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?” Mr. Ormerod exclaimed angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which Mrs. Ormerod half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her high light, and they remained silent until the servants came in, when everyone, with the exception of Mrs. Ormerod, fell on their knees. For she, poor lady, suffered from a chronic complaint and left the family party forever a year or two later, when the green sofa was moved into the corner, and the drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But Mr. Ormerod went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon the green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs. Ormerod lay there, but still looked much the same. “We deeply felt the happiness of ministering to his welfare,” Miss Ormerod wrote, “for he would not hear of our leaving him for even twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my brothers excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not being used to the gentle ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the Thursday following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the mature age of eighty-seven years.” Oh, graves in country churchyards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women are buried with you! There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious insects! Not, one would have thought, among God’s most triumphant creations, and yet—if you see them under a microscope!—the Bot, obese, globular, obscene; the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered, cadaverous. Next slip under the glass an innocent grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps—well, what does the landscape look like then? The only palatable object for the eye to rest on in acres of England is a lump of Paris Green. But English people won’t use microscopes; you can’t make them use Paris Green either—or if they do, they let it drip. Dr. Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t take a woman’s word. And indeed, though for the sake of the Ox Warble one must stretch a point, there are matters, questions of stock infestation, things one has to go into—things a lady doesn’t even like to see, much less discuss, in print—“these, I say, I intend to leave entirely to the Veterinary surgeons. My brother—oh, he’s dead now—a very good man—for whom I collected wasps’ nests—lived at Brighton and wrote about wasps—he, I say, wouldn’t let me learn anatomy, never liked me to do more than take sections of teeth.”