Aunt Cecilia wears a bonnet sometimes, and thereby hangs a tale.  So few aunts wear a bonnet nowadays that the fact of one doing so is almost worth chronicling.  She doesn’t wear it very often, only at the christenings of the head gardener’s babies.  From a christening point of view that is very often, but from a bonnet point of view I suppose it might be called seldom —­ once a year?  I know that bonnet well, because it has been sent to me often for renovation.  On one particular occasion it arrived in a cardboard box.  On the top of the bonnet was a bunch of flowers, beautiful enough to make any bonnet accompanying it welcome, in whatever state of dilapidation.  Aunt Cecilia has a knack of sending just the right sort of flowers, and they always bring a message, which everybody’s flowers don’t do.

The bonnet I renovated to the best of my ability and sent it back.  In the course of a few days I received a slightly agitated note from Aunt Cecilia.  “It doesn’t suit me, dearest, and after all the trouble you have taken!”

Knowing Aunt Cecilia, I wrote back, “Did you try it on in bed with your hair down?”

She answered by return, “Dearest, I did!  It really suits me very well now that I have tried it on in my right mind.  I am going to wear it at the last little Shrub’s christening, this afternoon.  It is just in time.”

When David and Diana were singled out by night for the particular attention of a burglar, Aunt Cecilia wrote to sympathize and said, “I am so thankful, dearest, David did not meet the poor, misguided man!”

May we all be judged as tenderly!

This is a digression, but it perhaps explains Pauline and Pauline’s wedding, and the joy with which all the people in the village entered into it.

The strangest people kept on arriving the morning of the wedding.  It was verily a gathering of the halt, the lame, and the blind —­ all friends of Pauline’s.  Whenever Uncle Jim was particularly overcome, it was sure to mean that some old soldier, officer or otherwise, had turned up, who had served with him in some part of the world, long before Pauline was born.  Aunt Cecilia welcomed them all in her inimitable manner, which made each one feel that he was the one and most particularly honored guest.  For all her apparent absent-mindedness, she knew exactly who belonged to Mrs. Bunce’s department and who not.

Mrs. Bunce, the old housekeeper, was very busy, every button doing its duty!  A wedding didn’t come her way every day.  The sisters-in-law, of course, came with their belongings.

Zerlina was distressed at the nature of many of the presents; and wondered if Pauline would have enough spare rooms to put them in; which showed how little she knew her.  If Pauline had told her that she valued the alabaster greyhound under a glass case, subscribed for by the old men and women in the village, over seventy, Zerlina wouldn’t have believed her any more than did old Mrs. Barker when Diana told her Sara was named after a dear old housemaid and not after the Duchess.