She pointed to a card framed and glazed over the mantelpiece--a card upon which, with many nourishes and fat initial letters in red ink, the model schoolmaster had recorded the fact, that Mrs. Binks, at the preceding Christmas distributions, had obtained Miss Granger's annual reward for domestic cleanliness. "Well, of course, miss, I set store by the card. It's nice to see one's name wrote out like that, and any strangers as chance to come in the summer time, they takes notice; but to a hard-working man's wife two pound is a consideration. I'm sure I beg your parding humbly, miss, if I spoke a bit short just now; but it is trying, when one has worked hard, to have one's work found fault with." "I am not aware that I found fault with your work, Mrs. Binks," Sophia replied with supreme dignity; "I merely remarked that it appeared to have been done hastily. I don't approve of spasmodic industry." And with this last crushing remark, Miss Granger sailed out of the cottage, leaving the luckless Mrs. Binks to repent her presumption at leisure, and to feel that she had hazarded her hopes of Christmas bounties, and enhanced the chances of her detested rival of three doors off, Mrs. Trotter, a sanctimonious widow, with three superhuman children, who never had so much as a spot on their pinafores, and were far in advance of the young Binkses in Kings and Chronicles; indeed the youngest Trotter had been familiar with all the works of Hezekiah before the eldest Binks had grasped the abstract idea of Saul.