“Where the golden furze
  With its green thin spurs
  Doth catch at the maiden’s gown.”

It is altogether a choice and goodly walk; next to nothing of the tame high-road.  The path leads through a deep wooded dell; over purple plough-lands; down retired lanes.

After an hour and a quarter of smartish walking, I reach the door.  There are no signs of ravaging children about.  Long, long ago—­years before this generation was born—­the noisy children went out; some to the church-yard; some, with clamor of wedding-bells, to separate life.  I knock, and after an interval hear the sound of pattens clacking across the flagged floor, and am admitted by an old woman, dried and pickled, by the action of the years, into an active cleanly old mummy, and whose fingers are wrinkled even more than time has done it, by the action of soapsuds.  I am received with the joyful reverence due to my exalted station, am led in, and posted right in front of the little red fire and the singing kettle, and introduced to a very old man, who sits on the settle in the warm chimney-corner, dressed in an ancient smock-frock, and with both knotted hands clasped on the top of an old oak staff.  He is evidently childish, and breaks now and then into an anile laugh at the thought, no doubt, of some dead old pothouse jest.  A complication arises through his persisting in taking me for a sister of Roger’s, who died thirty years ago, in early girlhood, and addressing me accordingly.  I struggle a little for my identity, but, finding the effort useless, resign it.

“This poor ould person is quoite aimless,” says his wife with dispassionate apology; “but what can you expect at noinety-one?”

(Her own years cannot be much fewer.)

I say tritely that it is a great age.

“He’s very fatiguin’ on toimes!—­that he is!” she continues, eying him with contemplated candor—­“he crumbles his wittles to that extent that I ‘ave to make him sit upo’ the News of the World”

As it seems to me that the conversation is taking a painful direction, I try to divert it by telling my news; but the bloom is again taken off it by the old man, who declines to be disabused of the idea that the Peninsular is still raging, and that it is Roger’s grandfather who is returning from that field of glory.  After a few more minutes, during which the old wife composedly tells me of all the children she has buried—­she has to think twice before she can recollect the exact number—­and in the same breath remarks, “How gallus bad their ’taters were last year,” I take my departure, and leave the old man still nodding his weak old head, and chuckling to the kettle.