with groups of roughly cast, crudely tinted pottery including
Lord Nelson and Elijah, all set in a thicket of brass candle-sticks.
Indeed, brass was the predominant note in the general decoration. The
walls were shining with tobacco boxes, snuffers, sconces and trays. Very
little space on the low walls could be found for pictures; but one or
two chromolithographs, including "Cherry Ripe" and "Bubbles," had
succeeded in establishing a right to be hung. All down the middle of the
room ran a long oak trestle-table, set with Chippendale chairs at the
end which Jenny and the family occupied, but where the rest of the
household sat, with benches. The five windows were veiled in curtains of
some dim red stuff, and between the two on the farther side from the
front door stood an exceptionally tall grandfather's clock, above whose
face, in a marine upheaval that involved the sun, moon and stars, united
rising, a ship rocked violently with every swing of the pendulum. A door
at the back opened to an echoing vault of laundries, sculleries, larders
and pantries, while in the corner beyond the outhouse door was a dark
and boxed staircase very straight and steep, a cavernous staircase
gaping to unknown corridors and rooms far away.

Old Mrs. Trewhella suited somehow that sinister gangway, for, being so
lame as to depend on a crutch, the measured thump of her progress was
carried down the gloom with an eternal sameness of sound that produced
in the listener a sensation of uneasiness. She had a hen-like face, the
brightness of whose eyes was continually shuttered by rapid blinks. Her
hair, very thin but scarcely gray, was smoothed down so close as to give
her head the appearance of a Dutch doll's. She had a slight mustache
and several tufted moles. There was much of the witch about her and more
of the old maid than the mother.

When the new arrivals had been seated at the table for some minutes, the
rest of the household trooped in through the outhouse door. Thomas
Hosken led the procession. His face under the glaze of soap looked more
like an orange than ever, and he had in his walk the indeterminate roll
of that fruit. Emily Day came next, a dark slip of a maid with
long-lashed stag's eyes, too large for the rest of her. She was followed
by Dicky Rosewarne, a full-blooded, handsome, awkward boy of about
twenty-three, loose-jointed like a yearling colt and bringing in with
him a smell of deep-turned earth, of bonfires and autumn leav