"Why, dad, I never saw such an old sleepy-head"--his wife had rallied him good-naturedly one night, looking at him with a sudden odd expression in her face. "Eh, lass, but I was noddin' and no mistake," said the old man, struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succumbing once more. "He's off again," said Mrs. Talbot to herself, as she lifted the lid of a pent saucepan in which some boiled onions were mightily bubbling in a wild little world of steam. Presently the old man sighed deeply,--so you would have thought; but Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say "Jane," and had said it for the last time. Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been trying to sleep, and at last he slept. To most people Mr. Talbot's death was the first intimation of his ever having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day's publicity which death enforced upon him. It was indeed well for him that he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him. This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur--"Jane, why ever didn't you bury me by the back door?" would surely have been the old man's pitiful complaint could he have known. However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen. It seemed almost strange that even his wife should miss him. One had thought so little of them as man and wife. One could hardly, even by process of thinking, realise that between these rinded and wrinkled beings love had once hung like a rosy cloud, from which one day had sprung Jenny. On one or two occasions, indeed, they had been surprised in an uncanny semblance of a caress, and once in a while an almost supernatural retrospect had lit up and vanished again in an unaccustomed tender word; and to have been present then was to feel somehow frightened. Ah! the gay young leaves no longer kiss across in the morning sun, but the stern old trees have meetings you know not of far beneath the ground. Their roots are twisted and twined in a wonderful embrace there; there in the dark they are very close together, and shall not be wrenched apart without groanings that cannot be uttered.