not love books and pictures, but they have to be so very
very good before they can in any way appease one, while the meanest
life is absorbingly interesting, invested as it must ever be with the
dignity of reality.

SIX.

GRANDMA CLAY'S LOVE-STORY.

"Oh, you don't want to hear it now," she said in response to my
request, but she gave a pleased laugh, betraying her willingness to
tell it. "Sometimes I get running on about old times an' don't know
where to stop, an' Dawn says people only pretend to be interested in
me out of politeness. I think I hinted to you that mine was a love
match--the only sort of marriage there ought to be; any other sort, in
my mind, is only fit for pigs."

"But sometimes love matches would be utterly absurd," I remarked.

"Well, then, people that are utterly absurd ought to be locked up in a
asylum. Anybody that's _fit_ to love wouldn't love a fool, because
there must be reason in everything. _Some_ people I know would love a
monkey, but they ain't fit to be counted with the people that keeps
the world going. Well, I got as far as we kep' a accommodation house
on the Sydney road,--fine road it was too, level and strong, and in
many places flagged by the convicts, an' it stands good to this day.
It ain't like these God-forsaken roads about here,"--grandma showed
symptoms of convulsions,--"but _some_ people is only good for to be
stuffed in a--a--asylum, and that's where the Noonoon Municipal
Council ought to be, an' I say it though Jake there, me own brother,
is one of them."

"Did Jim Clay--" I said, by way of keeping to the subject.

"I told you how I used to sneak out to buckle the horses on; an' w'en
Jack Clay, a great chum of me father's, used to be driving the 'Up'
coach, me father, w'en he'd be slack of passengers,--which wasn't
often, there being more life and people moving in the colony
then,--an' w'en I'd be good, would put me up on the box an' take me on
to the next stage, an' I'd come back with Jack Clay--that was me
husband's father.

"As it used to be in the night, it usedn't to take from me time, an' I'd
be up again next day as if I'd slep' forty hours. I wasn't like the
girls these days, if they go to a blessed ball an' are up a few hours
they nearly have to stay in bed a week after it. In that way I come to
be a great hand with the reins, an' me father took a deal of pride in me
because all the young men up that way began to talk about me. Me father
had the bes