ugh it. She obeyed my pull on the left rein, and went to Shady Dell
Farm as usual.

Another of Jane's eccentricities is a violent aversion to perambulators.
As Belvern is a fine, healthy, growing country, with steadily increasing
population, the roads are naturally alive with perambulators; or at
least alive with the babies inside the perambulators. These are the more
alarming to the timid eye in that many of them are double-barrelled,
so to speak, and are loaded to the muzzle with babies; for not only
do Belvern babies frequently appear as twins, but there are often two
youngsters of a perambulator age in the same family at the same time.
To weave that donkey and that Bath 'cheer' through the narrow streets
of the various Belverns without putting to death any babies, and without
engendering the outspoken condemnation of the screaming mothers and
nurserymaids, is a task for a Jehu. Of course Jane makes it more
difficult by lunging into one perambulator in avoiding another, but she
prefers even that risk to the degradation of treading the path I wish
her to tread.

I often wish that for one brief moment I might remove the lid of Jane's
brain and examine her mental processes. She would not exasperate me so
deeply if I could be certain of her springs of action. Is she old, is
she rheumatic, is she lazy, is she hungry? Sometimes I think she means
well, and is only ignorant and dull; but this hypothesis grows less and
less tenable as I know her better. Sometimes I conclude that she does
not understand me; that the difference in nationality may trouble her.
If an Englishman cannot understand an American woman all at once,
why should an English donkey? Perhaps it takes an American donkey to
comprehend an American woman. Yet I cannot bring myself to drive any
other donkey; I am always hoping to impress myself on her imagination,
and conquer her will through her fancy. Meanwhile, I like to feel myself
in the grasp of a nature stronger than my own, and so I hold to Jane,
and buy a photograph of St. Bridget's Well!

Chapter XXII. Comfort Cottage.

It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, and I suddenly heard
a strange sound, that of our fowl cackling. Yesterday I heard her
tell-tale note about noon, and the day before just as I was eating my
breakfast. I knew that it would be so! The serpent has entered Eden.
That fowl has laid before eight in the morning for three weeks without
interruption, and she has now entered