But a professional aunt would of course be expected to make special terms, although her hens, like those of other people, would eat corn, and railways would charge just the same for carrying her goods, whether they were consigned to sisters-in-law or not, and the expense of the carriage is the reason invariably given why things are so dear when bought from friends.  Friends, too, have a way of sending chickens with their feathers on, whereas the chickens one knows by sight, laid in rows in poulterers’ shops, have no association with feathers.  Don’t you dislike the country friend who asks you to spend a night, and then tells you at breakfast that the pillow you slept on was filled with the feathers of departed hens known and loved by her?

Then there was Nannie, and my, living in London added a great importance to her position.  She became at once chaperon, housekeeper, counselor, and friend.  It was a great joy to her to think that she shielded me from the dangers of London; and she would willingly have fetched me from dinners and parties generally, and saw nothing incongruous in the announcement, " Miss Lisle’s nurse is at the door.”

“Not that I should be at the door,” said Nannie; “I never go anywhere but what I am asked inside and treated as such.”  Nannie still thinks of us as children, and will continue to do so, no doubt until she who has rocked so many babies to sleep shall herself be enfolded in the arms of Mother Earth —­ and tenderly bidden to sleep.

Personally I had a leaning toward a flat, so many of my friends told me of the joys of shutting it up when one goes away, which, by the way, I find they never, or very rarely, do.  But Nannie didn’t hold with flats.  It is curious what things people don’t hold with.  After reading of a terrible murder in a railway carriage, I cautioned my little housemaid, who was going home one Sunday, to be careful not to be thrown out of a window.  She replied, “I don’t hold with girls who are thrown out of windows.”

Well, Nannie didn’t hold with flats.  To please me and to show her open-mindedness, she went with me to look at flats, but there was a tactless integrity about her criticism.  I discovered that she judged of everything from a nursery point of view; and when I ventured to suggest that, as there were no children, a nursery was not of very great importance, she said, “You never can tell.”  In this instance I felt I could most distinctly tell, and wondered whether I might too tell Nannie of something I didn’t hold with.  But I didn’t.  I remember once long ago one of us asking Nannie if any one could have children without being married, and Nannie answered in a very matter of fact voice, “They can, dear, but it’s better not.”  Anyhow, she didn’t hold with flats.  “There’s the porters for one thing,” she said.  That, of course, settled it, and we looked at small houses.

“I suppose you will get married one of these days,” she said, as we stood on a doorstep waiting to be let in.