“Walk! Of course you can’t. And what did my husband say to me before I started? Says he, ‘You’ll have to get a conveyance to take him.’ ‘Leave me alone for that,’ says I; ‘although right you are.’ And I says to my cousin’s husband, who drives a hackney coach, ‘Just you drop down and carry him home. It won’t be ten minutes out of your time.’ So he’ll be here in about a quarter of an hour. As for the doctor, I understand as much about you as he does, and, doctor or no doctor, you won’t sleep in this bed to-night. I’ll go and tell the head nurse or master, or somebody or the other, that you are off. You just put on your clothes.” In a short time she returned, found Zachariah dressed, wrapped him round in shawls and rugs, helped him downstairs, put him into the coach, and brought him to her cousin’s. It was a little house, in a long uniform street; but a good deal of pains had been taken with it to make it something special. There were two bedroom windows in front, on the upper storey, and each one had flowers outside. The flower-pots were prevented from falling off the ledge by a lattice-work wrought in the centre into a little gate—an actual little gate. What purpose it was intended to answer is a mystery; but being there the owner of the flower-pots unfastened it every morning when the sill was dusted, and removed them through it, although lifting them would have been a much simpler operation. There were flowers in the sitting-room downstairs too; but they were inside, as the window was flush with the pavement. This sitting-room was never used except on Sundays. It was about nine feet square, and it had in it a cupboard on either side of the fireplace, a black horse-hair sofa alongside the wall on the right-hand side of the door, red curtains, a black horse-hair arm-chair, three other chairs to match, a little round table, two large shells, a framed sampler on the wall representing first the letters of the alphabet, then the figures 1, 2, 3, &c., and, finally, a very blue Jesus talking to a very red woman of Samaria on a very yellow well—underneath, the inscription and date, “Margaret Curtin, 10th March 1785.” The only other decorations—for pictures were dear in those days—were two silhouettes, male, and female, one at each corner of the mantelpiece, and two earthenware dogs which sat eternally looking at one another on the top of one of the cupboards. On the cupboard farthest away from the window was a large Bible with pictures in it and notes, and, strange to say, a copy of Ferguson’s Astronomy and a handsome quarto edition in three volumes of Cook’s First Voyage. Everything was as neat and clean as it could possibly be; but Mr. and Mrs. Hocking had no children, and had saved a little money.