y of evergreens in it
and a cedar. It was not at all a garden-party garden, because there was
a well-worn cricketpitch right in the middle of the lawn, and Gregory
had a railway system where the best flowers ought to be; but it was a
garden full of fun, and old Kink, the gardener, managed to get a great
many vegetables out of it, too, although not so many as Collins thought
he ought to.

Collins was the cook, a fat, smiling, hot lady of about fifty, who had
been with Mrs. Avory ever since she married. Collins understood
children thoroughly, and made cakes that were rather wet underneath.
Her Yorkshire pudding (for Sunday's dinner) was famous, and her horse
radish sauce was so perfect that it brought tears to the eyes.

Collins collected picture postcards and adored the family. She had
never been cross to any of them, but her way with the butcher's boy and
the grocer's boy and the fishmonger's boy was terrible.

She snapped their heads off (so to speak) every morning, and old Kink
spent quite a lot of his time in rubbing from off the backdoor the
awful things they wrote about her in chalk.

The parlourmaid was Eliza Pollard, who had red hair and a kind heart,
but was continually falling out with her last young man and getting
another. She told Hester all about it. Hester had a special knack of
being told about the servants' young men, for she knew also all about
those of Eliza Pollard's predecessors.

The housemaid was Jane Masters, who helped Eliza Pollard to make the
beds. Jane Masters did not hold with fickleness in love--in fact, she
couldn't abide it--and therefore she was steadily true to a young man
called 'Erb, who looked after the lift at the Stores, and was a
particular friend of Gregory's in consequence. No man who had charge of
a lift could fail to be admired by Gregory.

Finally--and very likely she ought to have come first--was Runcie, or
Mrs. Runciman, who had not only been the nurse of all the Avories, but
of Mrs. Avory before them, when Mrs. Avory was a slip of a girl named
Janet Easton. Runcie was then quite young herself, and why she was
suddenly called Mrs. no one ever quite knew, for she had never married.
And now she was getting on for sixty, and had not much to do except
sympathize with the Avories and reprove the servants. She had a nice
sitting room of her own, where she sat comfortably every afternoon when
such work as she did was done, and received visits from her pets, as
she called the