Chapter XXIII. Tea served here.



It was some days after the naming of the cottage that Mrs. Bobby
admitted me into her financial secrets, and explained the
difficulties that threatened her peace of mind. She still has
twenty-five pounds to pay before Comfort Cottage is really her own.
With her cow and her vegetable garden, to say nothing of her
procrastinating fowl, she manages to eke out a frugal existence, now
that her eldest son is in a blacksmith's shop at Worcester, and is
sending her part of his weekly savings. But it has been a poor
season for canaries, and a still poorer one for lodgers; for people
in these degenerate days prefer to be nearer the hotels and the mild
gaieties of the larger settlements. It is all very well so long as
I remain with her, and she wishes fervently that that may be for
ever; for never, she says, eloquently, never in all her Cheltenham
and Belvern experience, has she encountered such a jewel of a lodger
as her dear Miss 'Amilton, so little trouble, and always a bit of
praise for her plain cooking, and a pleasant word for the children,
to whom most lodgers object, and such an interest in the cow and the
fowl and the garden and the canaries, and such kindness in painting
the name of the cottage, so that it is the finest thing in the
village, and nobody can get past the 'ouse without stopping to gape
at it! But when her American lodger leaves her, she asks,--and who
is she that can expect to keep a beautiful young lady who will be
naming her own cottage and painting signboards for herself before
long, likely?--but when her American lodger is gone, how is she,
Mrs. Bobby, to put by a few shillings a month towards the debt on