These were her own words and, considering the circumstances under which they were spoken, they are enough to stamp the speaker as a remarkable woman. She has got as much from age and lost as little from youth as woman can well do. Nevertheless, to look at, she is like one of the witches in _Macbeth_. New-Laid Eggs When I take my Sunday walks in the country, I try to buy a few really new-laid eggs warm from the nest. At this time of the year (January) they are very hard to come by, and I have long since invented a sick wife who has implored me to get her a few eggs laid not earlier than the self-same morning. Of late, as I am getting older, it has become my daughter who has just had a little baby. This will generally draw a new-laid egg, if there is one about the place at all. At Harrow Weald it has always been my wife who for years has been a great sufferer and finds a really new-laid egg the one thing she can digest in the way of solid food. So I turned her on as movingly as I could not long since, and was at last sold some eggs that were no better than common shop eggs, if so good. Next time I went I said my poor wife had been made seriously ill by them; it was no good trying to deceive her; she could tell a new-laid egg from a bad one as well as any woman in London, and she had such a high temper that it was very unpleasant for me when she found herself disappointed. “Ah! sir,” said the landlady, “but you would not like to lose her.” “Ma’am,” I replied, “I must not allow my thoughts to wander in that direction. But it’s no use bringing her stale eggs, anyhow.” “The Egg that Hen Belonged to” I got some new-laid eggs a few Sundays ago. The landlady said they were her own, and talked about them a good deal. She pointed to one of them and said: “Now, would you believe it? The egg that hen belonged to laid 53 hens running and never stopped.” She called the egg a hen and the hen an egg. One would have thought she had been reading _Life and Habit_ [p. 134 and passim]. At Englefield Green As an example of how anything can be made out of anything or done with anything by those who want to do it (as I said in _Life and Habit_ that a bullock can take an eyelash out of its eye with its hind-foot—which I saw one of my bullocks in New Zealand do), at the Barley Mow, Englefield Green, they have a picture of a horse and dog talking to one another, made entirely of butterflies’ wings, and very well and spiritedly done too. They have another picture, done in the same way, of a greyhound running after a hare, also good but not so good. At Abbey Wood I heard a man say to another: “I went to live there just about the time that beer came down from 5d. to 4d. a pot. That will give you an idea when it was.” At Ightham Mote We took Ightham on one of our Sunday walks about a fortnight ago, and Jones and I wanted to go inside over the house. My cousin said, “You’d much better not, it will only unsettle your history.”