Once, when I was in the merry twenties, a dirty old hag with an evil report, but no worse than other people, except that she was an old slut, knocked at my back door and asked to see “The Lady Shepherd.” Mrs. Triplet was a Mormonite, at any rate her husband was; and it was credibly believed that Mrs. Triplet herself had been baptized by immersion in a horsepond in the dead of night, dressed as Godiva was dressed during her famous ride, and seated, not upon a palfrey, but upon a jackass. How Triplet could ever have been converted to a belief in polygamy with his experience of the married state, I am entirely unable to explain. But Mrs. Triplet came to our door and asked for “The Lady Shepherd.” It was a delicate piece of flattery. She must have thought over it a long time. Was not the parson the shepherd? a bad one it might be, a hireling, a blind leader of the blind, but still a shepherd. Then his wife must needs be a shepherdess--and she did not look like it--or a sheep--No! that wouldn’t do at all--or the shepherd’s lady--and shepherds don’t have ladies; or--happy thought!--the Lady Shepherd. Accordingly Mrs. Triplet asked for the Lady Shepherd. Mrs. Triplet in former times had been a tailor’s hand, and in that capacity had made a few shillings a week by odd jobs for the Cambridge tailors in term time; but she had married, and now she lived too far away in the wilds to be able to continue at her old employment, and being a bad manager, she soon had to cast about for some new source of income. In the more comfortable cottages in the eastern counties you may often see laid out before the fire a mat of peculiar construction which sometimes looks like a small mattress in difficulties. It is made from selvages and clippings, the refuse of the tailor’s workshop; these strips of cloth are cut into lengths of two or three inches long by half an inch wide, and are knitted or tightly tied together with string, the variously coloured scraps being arranged in patterns according to the genius and taste of the artist. The complex structure when completed is stuffed with the clippings too small to be worked up on the outside, and the mass is then subjected to a process of thumping and stamping and pulling and hammering till at last there exudes--yes! that is the correct term, whatever you may say--a lumpy bundle, which in its pillowy and billowy entirety is called a hearthrug. The thing will last for generations, it never wears out, and it takes years of continuous stamping upon it before you can anyhow get it flat. It was one of these triumphs of industry that Mrs. Triplet desired to turn an honest penny by. Would her ladyship come and look at it _in situ_?