It was night, but neither lamp nor candle were required; the fire's warm blaze gave ample light, and a more comfortable little cottage than old Elsie's when viewed by that hospitable glow, was not to be found in the three Lothians. Three oak chairs of ancient construction, a table similar, a great meal girnel in one corner, flanked by a peat bunker in the other, and an odd variety of stoups, pitchers, and three-legged stools made up the background. On the table lay an old quarto bible from which Lilian read aloud certain passages every night, Andro Hart's "Psalmes in Scot's meter," and the "Hynd let loose" of the "Godly Mr. Sheils," who was then in the hands of the Phillistines, and keeping the Reverend Ichabod Bummel company in the towers of the Bass. Two kirn-babies decorated with blue ribbons, a quaint woodcut of our first parents' joining hands under what resembled a great cabbage in the Garden of Eden appeared over the mantel-piece, together with a long rusty partisan with which the umquhile John Elshender had laid about him like a Trojan on the battle-field of Dunbar. Close by the ingle sat his widow Elsie enjoying its warmth, and listening to the birr of her wheel. She was a hale old woman of seventy years, with a nose and chin somewhat prominent; her grey hair was neatly disposed under a snowwhite cap of that Flemish fashion which is still common in Scotland, and over which a simple black ribbon marks widowhood. Her upper attire consisted of a coarse skirt of dark blue stuff, over which fell a short linen gown, reaching a little below her girdle, which bristled with keys, knitting wires, pincushion, and scissors. Similarly attired in a short Scottish gown, which showed to the utmost advantage the full outline of her buxom figure, her niece Meinie, a rosy, hazel-eyed, and dark-haired girl of twenty, stood by the meal girnel baking (Anglicé _kneading_), and as the sleeves of her dress came but a little below the shoulder, her fair round arms and dimpled elbows did not belie the pretty and merry face, which now and then peeped round at the group near the fire. Two of these ought perhaps to have been described first. Disguised as a peasant, Lady Grisel no longer wore her white hair puffed out by Monsieur Pouncet's skill, but smoothed under a plain starched bigonet, coif, or mutch (which you will), and very ill at ease the stately old dame appeared in her hostess's coarse attire. By way of pre-eminence she occupied the great leathern chair, in which no mortal had been seated since the decease of John Elshender, who for forty consecutive years had hung his bonnet on a knob thereof, while taking his evening doze therein, after a day's ploughing or harrowing on the rigs of Drumdryan.