village, and his wife, lived in it all the year round; so did one of
the shopkeepers. Several other quiet people lived there all winter; in
summer the prices were raised, and it was filled to overflowing by more
fashionable visitors from the two cities that were within a short
journey. This "hotel" was an enormous wooden house, built in the
simplest fashion, a wide corridor running from front to rear on each
storey, on which the room doors opened. Rooms and corridors were large,
lofty, and well-lighted by large windows. The dining-room,
billiard-room, office, and bar-room, on the ground-floor, together with
the stairs and corridors, were uncarpeted, painted all over a light
slate grey. With the exception of healthy geraniums in most of the
windows, there was little ornament in these ground-floor rooms; but all
was new, clean, and airy. The upper rooms were more heavily furnished,
but were most of them shut up in winter. All the year round the landlord
took in the daily papers; and for that reason his bar-room, large and
always tolerably quiet, was the best public reading-room the village
boasted.

The keeper of this establishment was a rather elderly man, and of late
he had been so crippled by rheumatism that he could walk little and only
on crutches. He was not a dainty man; his coat was generally dusty, his
grey beard had always a grimy appearance of tobacco about it. He spent
the greater part of his day now sitting in a high pivot chair, his
crutches leaning against it.

"You see, miss," he said to Eliza, "I'll tell you what the crying need
for you is in this house at present; it's to step round spry and see
that the girls do their work. It's this way; when I was spry, if I
wasn't in the room, the young people knew that, like as not, I was just
round the corner; they knew I _might_ be there any minute; at present
they know they'll hear my sticks before I see them. It makes all the
difference. What I want of you is to be feet for me, and eyes for me,
and specially in the dining-room. Mrs. Bantry--that dressy lady you saw
in the corridor--Mrs. Bantry told me that this morning they brought her
buckwheat cakes, and _ten minutes after_, the syrup to eat 'em with. How
hot do you suppose they were?"

He finished his speech with the fine sarcasm of this question. He looked
at Eliza keenly. "You're young," he remarked warningly, "but I believe
you're powerful."

And Eliza showed that she was powerful by doing the thing th