“I find it a bit of a strain, mum,” Chivers candidly replied, “to keep up--fairly to call it--with what you _do_ say.” “That’s just what everyone finds it!”--she broke into the happiest laugh. “Yet I haven’t come here to suffer in silence, you know--to suffer, I mean, from envy and despair.” She was in constant movement, from side to side, observing, comparing, returning, taking notes while she gossiped and gossiping, too, for remembrance. The intention of remembrance even had in it, however, some prevision of failure or some alloy of irritation. “You’re so fatally right and so deadly complete, all the same, that I can really scarcely bear it: with every fascinating feature that I had already heard of and thought I was prepared for, and ever so many others that, strange to say, I hadn’t and wasn’t, and that you just spring right _at_ me like a series of things going off. What do you call it,” she asked--“a royal salute, a hundred guns?” Her enthusiasm had a bewildering form, but it had by this time warmed the air, and the old man rubbed his hands as over a fire to which the bellows had been applied. “I saw as soon as you arrived, mum, that you were looking for more things than ever _I_ heard tell of!” “Oh, I had got you by heart,” she returned, “from books and drawings and photos; I had you in my pocket when I came: so, you see, as soon as you were so good as to give me my head and let me loose, I knew my way about. It’s all here, every inch of it,” she competently continued, “and now at last I can do what I want!” A light of consternation, at this, just glimmered in Chivers’s face. “And pray, mum, what might that be?” “Why, take you right back with me--to Missoura Top.” This answer seemed to fix his bewilderment, but he was there for the general convenience. “Do I understand you, mum, that you require to take _me_?” Her particular convenience, on the spot, embraced him, so new and delightful a sense had he suddenly read into her words. “Do you mean to say you’d come--as the old Family Servant? Then _do_, you nice real thing: it’s just what I’m dying for--an old Family Servant! You’re somebody’s else, yes--but everything, over here, is somebody’s else, and I want, too, a first-rate second-hand one, all ready made, as you are, but not too much done up. You’re the best I’ve seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed--put up in paper and bran--as I shall have my old pot there.” She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: “Don’t let me _forget_ my precious pot!” Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. “Don’t you just love old crockery? That’s awfully sweet old Chelsea.”