I thanked her again, and begged her not to heed my presence in the least, but go on with her usual affairs.

I was struck by the aspect of the room. The house was old, and constitutionally damp. The window- sills had beads of exuded dampness upon them. The shrivelled sashes shook in their frames, and the green panes of glassed were clouded with the long thaw. On some little errand the dame passed into an adjoining chamber, leaving the door partly open. The floor of that room was carpetless, as the kitchen’s was. Nothing but bare necessaries were about me; and those not of the best sort. Not a print on the wall; but an old volume of Doddridge lay on the smoked chimney-shelf.

‘You must have walked a long way, sir; you sigh so with weariness.’

‘No, I am not nigh so weary as yourself, I dare say.’

‘Oh, but I am accustomed to that; you are not, I should think,’ and her soft, sad blue eye ran over my dress. ‘But I must sweep these shavings away; husband made him a new axe-helve this morning before sunrise, and I have been so busy washing, that I have had no time to clear up. But now they are just the thing I want for the fire. They’d be much better though, were they not so green.’

Now if Blandmour were here, thought I to myself, he would call those green shavings poor man’s matches, or poor man’s tinder, or some pleasant name of that sort.

‘I do not know,’ said the good woman, turning round to me again—as she stirred among her pots on the smoky fire—‘I do not know how you will like our pudding. It is only rice, milk and salt boiled together.’

‘Ah, what they call poor man’s pudding, I suppose you mean.’

A quick flush, half resentful, passed over her face.

‘We do not call it so, sir,’ she said, and was silent.

Upbraiding myself for my inadvertence, I could not but again think to myself what Blandmour would have said, had he heard those words and seen that flush.

At last a slow, heavy footfall was heard; then a scraping at the door, and another voice said, ‘Come, wife; come, come—I must be back again in a jiff—if you say I must take all my meals at home, you must be speedy; because the squire—Good-day, sir,’ he exclaimed, now first catching sight of me as he entered the room. He turned towards his wife, enquiringly, and stood stock-still, while the moisture oozed from his patched boots to the floor.

‘This gentleman stops here awhile to rest and refresh: he will take dinner with us, too. All will be ready now in a trice; so sit down on the bench, husband, and be patient, I pray. You see, sir,’ she continued, turning to me, ‘William there wants, of mornings, to carry a cold meal into the woods with him, to save the long one-o’clock walk across the fields to and fro. But I won’t let him. A warm dinner is more than pay for the long walk.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said William, shaking his head. ‘I have often debated in my mind whether it really paid. There’s not much odds, either way, between a wet walk after hard work and a wet dinner before it. But I like to oblige a good wife like Martha. And you know, sir, that women will have their whimsies.’

‘I wish they all had as kind whimsies as your wife has,’ said I.

‘Well, I’ve heard that some women ain’t all maple-sugar; but, content with dear Martha, I don’t know much about others.’

‘You find rare wisdom in the woods,’ mused I.