“I’ve had lots of shocks,” she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky rocking-chair.  The light from over the way flickered and gleamed.  Mrs. Brown’s broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber, as she rocked in and out of the silver rays.  Her voice was a metallic whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat.  Married at sixteen, her whole life had been Brown on earth below and God in His heaven above.  Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years together.  It was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about was Brown’s death.  The story began with “a breakfast one Sunday morning at nine o’clock....  Brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes, set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called me.  And that wasn’t one morning, mind you—­it was every morning for fifty years.  But this particular morning I noticed him speaking strange; his tongue was kind o’ thick.  He didn’t hardly eat nothing, and as soon as I’d done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump ’em.  When he come up he seemed dizzy.  I says to him, ‘Don’t you feel good?’ but he didn’t seem able to answer.  He made like he was going to undress.  He put his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in—­he couldn’t move it no more; it was dead and cold when I touched it.  He leaned up against the wall, and I tried to get him over on to the sofa.  When I looked into his eyes I see that he was gone.  He couldn’t stand, but I held on to him with all my force; I didn’t let his head strike as he went down. When he fell we fell together.”  Her voice was choked; even now after three years as she told the story she could not believe it herself.

Presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her shocks—­three times struck by lightning and once run over.  Her simple descriptions are straightforward and dramatic.  As she talks the wind blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china knob, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor.  Tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.

“Brown put that up,” she says; “there hasn’t no hand touched it since his’n.”

Proprietor of this house in which she lives, Mrs. Brown is fairly well off.  She rents one floor to an Italian family, one to some labourers, and one to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling.  She has a way of disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account of herself.  Relations are strained, and Mrs. Brown in speaking of her says: 

“I don’t care what trouble I was in, I wouldn’t call in that Irish woman.  I don’t have anything to do with her.  I’d rather get the Dago next door.”  And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the Italians—­the same sentiments I have heard expressed before in the labouring centres.