have had
your breakfast!"

"A blessing--if this was to be my breakfast. I call that, my dear, the
very smallest egg I have seen since I took sparrows' nests. No wonder
they sell them at twelve a penny. I congratulate you upon your first
egg, my dear Mary."

"Well, I don't care," replied Mrs. Hockin, who had the sweetest temper
in the world. "Small beginnings make large endings; and an egg must be
always small at one end. You scorn my first egg, and Erema should have
had it if she had been good. But she was very wicked, and I know not
what to do with it."

"Blow it!" cried the Major. "I mean no harm, ladies. I never use low
language. What I mean is, make a pinhole at each end, give a puff, and
away goes two pennyworth, and you have a cabinet specimen, which your
egg is quite fitted by its cost to be. But now, Mary, talk to Miss Wood,
if you please. It is useless for me to say any thing, and I have three
appointments in the town"--he always called it "the town" now--"three
appointments, if not four; yes, I may certainly say four. Talk to Miss
Wood, my dear, if you please. She wants to go to London, which would be
absurd. Ladies seem to enter into ladies' logic. They seem to be able to
appreciate it better, to see all the turns, and the ins and outs, which
no man has intellect enough to see, or at least to make head or tail of.
Good-by for the present; I had better be off."

"I should think you had," exclaimed Mrs. Hockin, as her husband
marched off, with his side-lights on, and his short, quick step, and
well-satisfied glance at the hill which belonged to him, and the beach,
over which he had rights of plunder--or, at least, Uncle Sam would have
called them so, strictly as he stood up for his own.

"Now come and talk quietly to me, my dear," Mrs. Hockin began, most
kindly, forgetting all the marvel of her first-born egg. "I have noticed
how restless you are, and devoid of all healthy interest in any thing.
'Listless' is the word. 'Listless' is exactly what I mean, Erema. When
I was at your time of life, I could never have gone about caring for
nothing. I wonder that you knew that I even had a fowl; much more how
much they had eaten!"

"I really do try to do all I can, and that is a proof of it," I said.
"I am not quite so listless as you think. But those things do seem so
little to me."

"My dear, if you were happy, they would seem quite large, as, after all
the anxieties of my life, I am able now to think them.