William Lyon sat sipping his drink while Jen eyed him furtively as she went about the house, doing her duties with the silence and exactitude of a well-oiled machine. She was a difficult subject, my aunt Jen, to live with, but she could be got at, as her father well knew, by a humanizing vanity. He sat back with an air of content in his great wide chair, the chair that had been handed down as the seat of the head of the house from many generations of Lyonses. He sipped and nodded his head, looking towards his daughter, and lifting the tankard with a courtly gesture as if pledging her health. Jen was pleased, though for a while she did not allow it to be seen, and her only repentance was taking up the big empty goblet without being asked and going to the still-room to refill it. During her absence my grandfather shamelessly winked at my grandmother, while my grandmother shook her fist covertly at her husband. Which pantomime meant to say on the part of William Lyon that _he_ knew how to manage women, while on his wife's side it inferred that she would not demean herself to use means so simple and abject as plain flattery even with a "camsteary" daughter. But they smiled at each other, not ill-content, and as my grandmother passed to the dresser she paused by the great oak chair long enough to murmur, "She's coming round!" But my grandfather only smiled and looked towards the door that led to the still-room, pantries and so forth, as if he found the time long without his second pot of sugar ale. He was something of a diplomat, my grandfather. It was while sitting thus, with the second drink of harmless "Jamaica" before him, my aunt and grandmother crossing each other ceaselessly on silent feet, that a knock came to the front door. Now in Galloway farm houses there is a front door, but no known use for it has been discovered, except to _be_ a door. Later, it was the custom to open it to let in the minister on his stated visitations, and later still to let out the dead. But at the period of which I write it was a door and nothing more. Both of these other uses are mere recent inventions. The shut front door of my early time stood blistering and flaking in the hot sun, or soaking--crumbling, and weather-beaten--during months of bad weather. For, with a wide and noble entrance behind upon the yard, so well-trodden and convenient, so charged with the pleasant press of entrants and exodants, so populous with affairs, from which the chickens had to be "shooed" and the moist noses of questing calves pushed aside twenty times a day--why should any mortal think of entering by the front door of the house. First of all it was the front door. Next, no one knew whether it would open or not, though the odds were altogether against it. Lastly, it was a hundred miles from anywhere and opened only upon a stuffy lobby round which my grandmother usually had her whole Sunday wardrobe hung up in bags smelling of lavender to guard against the moths.