e back door-step was a woman!--an' pretty well as
gashly as the man. She was just a 'natomy of a woman, wi' the lines
of her ribs showin' under the gown, an' a hot red spot 'pon either
cheek-bone, where the skin was stretched tight as a drum. She looked
not to ha' fed for a year; an', if you please, she'd a needle and
strip o' calico in her hands, sewin' away all the while her eyes were
glarin' down into mine.

"But there was a trick I minded in the way she worked her mouth, an'
says I, 'Missus Polwarne, your husband's a-waitin' for 'ee, round by
the front door.'

"'Aw, is he indeed?' she answers, holdin' her needle for a moment--
an' her voice was all hollow, like as if she pumped it up from a
fathom or two. 'Then, if he knows what's due to his wife, I'll
trouble en to come round,' she says; 'for this here's the door _I_
mean to go in by.'"

But at this point Simon asserts very plausibly that he swooned off;
so it is not known how they settled it.

[This story is true, as anyone who cares may assure himself by
referring to Robert Hunt's "Drolls of the West of England," p. 357.]

IV.--THE BOY BY THE BEACH.

There are in this small history some gaps that can never be filled
up; but as much as I know I will tell you.

The cottage where Kit lived until he was five years old stands at the
head of a little beach of white shingle, just inside the harbour's
mouth, so that all day long Kit could see the merchant-ships trailing
in from sea, and passing up to the little town, or dropping down to
the music of the capstan-song, and the calls and the creaking, as
their crews hauled up the sails. Some came and went under bare poles
in the wake of panting tugs; but those that carried canvas pleased
Kit more. For a narrow coombe wound up behind the cottage, and down
this coombe came not only the brook that splashed by the garden gate,
but a small breeze, always blowing, so that you might count on seeing
the white sails take it, and curve out majestically as soon as ever
they came opposite the cottage, and hold it until under the lee of
the Battery Point.

Besides these delights, the cottage had a plantation of ash and hazel
above it, that climbed straight to the smooth turf and the four guns
of the Battery; and a garden with a tamarisk hedge, and a bed of
white violets, the earliest for miles around, and a fuchsia tree
three times as tall as Kit, and a pink climbing rose that looked in
at Kit's window and blossomed