ALTHOUGH you cannot see her cottage, you can look at a portion of the brook that runs by the end of her garden, in which the old white duck and three of her little ducklings are swimming, while the remainder have left the water and got out on the grass to be fed. That is the old woman's little granddaughter who is holding the duckling in both her hands, and kissing it, and the other is her companion, who lives over the hill where you see a little morsel of blue sky between the overhanging leaves, and who has come all the way along that footpath to play with her, and feed the little ducklings. If you notice the duckling the granddaughter is petting, you will see it has got its eye on the food in the little girl's hand; and if you could read its thoughts, you would find it was saying to itself, "O, bother your fuss and stew! I wish you would put me down, and let me gobble up some of that nice new bread before it is all gone. Kissing, and patting, and nursing me won't fill my belly, I can tell you; though it's all well enough, when I've eaten until I'm full to the very top of my neck, to snuggle to you and be kept nice and warm, while I have a good long nap." You can see by its eye it's a sly little duckling; and though it pretends to be so fond of the child, lying still and such like, yet it's all of a fidget to get down, and quite envies the little ducklings that are feeding out of the other girl's hand. That is the Greedy duckling. Now the grandmother is such a funny little old woman, having one leg shorter than the other, which causes her to go up and down as she walks! The villagers call her Old Hoppity-kick, because, when she walks with her horn-handled stick and moves it along, she goes "hop," and when she moves both her feet she goes "hoppity," and when she pulls up her short leg to start again, she gives a kind of a little "kick" with it; so that what with her long leg, her short leg, and her stick, the noise she makes when she walks rather fast sounds a good deal like "hoppity-kick, hoppity-kick." Then she has a sharp, hooked nose, not much unlike the beak of a poll parrot; and she wears round spectacles with horn rims, and these she always calls her "goggles;" and, besides all this, she is hump-backed, and has an old gray cat that is very fond of jumping on her hump, and sitting there when she goes out into her garden, looking about him as well as she does, as if to see how things are getting on. She talks to her old cat, when she has no one else to speak to, just as she does to her granddaughter.