'MY DEAR WINEFRED,――Your good mother and I hope you are well, as it leaves me. I send you two pretty eardrops that I had when I was married. I have grown old and fat and ugly, and shall never wear them no more. They suit young and pretty faces, so take them, and when you wear them think of your mother's and my hearts that hang on you. I send them to you by Jack Rattenbury, who has found a place at last, and decent wages, so he tells me, enough to keep him in bread and cheese. He is a good lad and upright, and I am pleased to know it. Your mother is tolerably well. My brindled half-Jersey has dropped her calf, and we have had trouble that way before. I am going to look out for a goat to run with the cows. That is a good thing where they take to dropping their calves. Good-bye, I'm terrible short of breath with writing so much.――Your affectionate friend and well-wisher, ELIZA JOSE. '_M.P._――Your mother is a curious customer. She was all agog for you to go to Bath, and now she is in a sort of raging fever and ague to boot because you are away. 'Tis exactly like a cow when they've took away her calf.' Winefred sat in the window turning over the earrings, but thinking rather of the 'M.P.' than of anything else, when there came a rap at her door, and, without awaiting a response, Jesse entered. 'What have you there?' she asked at once, her feminine eye lighting on the bit of cheap jewellery. 'It is a present from dear Mrs. Jose.' 'Mercy on us! you cannot wear such absurd fandangles.' 'I would not offend Mrs. Jose for all the world, and she says such pretty things about them.' 'She is a darling, and our cousin, though mamma is too gorgeous a personage to admit it. But Nebuchadnezzar's image had feet of clay and the awful erection of the Tomkin-Jones family has common soil at the bottom of it. But those ear-pendants are ridiculous.' 'I shall wear them when I go back to Axmouth.'