unless you look beneath the table. I feel that I have earned time
for an hour's writing at last, and at it I go with vigour. One
page, two pages, really I am making progress, when - was that a
door opening? But I have my mother's light step on the brain, so I
'yoke' again, and next moment she is beside me. She has not
exactly left her room, she gives me to understand; but suddenly a
conviction had come to her that I was writing without a warm mat at
my feet. She carries one in her hands. Now that she is here she
remains for a time, and though she is in the arm-chair by the fire,
where she sits bolt upright (she loved to have cushions on the
unused chairs, but detested putting her back against them), and I
am bent low over my desk, I know that contentment and pity are
struggling for possession of her face: contentment wins when she
surveys her room, pity when she looks at me. Every article of
furniture, from the chairs that came into the world with me and
have worn so much better, though I was new and they were second-
hand, to the mantle-border of fashionable design which she sewed in
her seventieth year, having picked up the stitch in half a lesson,
has its story of fight and attainment for her, hence her
satisfaction; but she sighs at sight of her son, dipping and
tearing, and chewing the loathly pen.

'Oh, that weary writing!'

In vain do I tell her that writing is as pleasant to me as ever was
the prospect of a tremendous day's ironing to her; that (to some,
though not to me) new chapters are as easy to turn out as new
bannocks. No, she maintains, for one bannock is the marrows of
another, while chapters - and then, perhaps, her eyes twinkle, and
says she saucily, 'But, sal, you may be right, for sometimes your