these things, she put on her bonnet, took off her
apron, tied a new boot-lace round her umbrella, and after listening for
a long time at door and window, opened the door and sallied out into a
perilous world. The umbrella was under her arm and she clutched the
bundle with two gnarled and resolute hands. It was her best Sunday
bonnet, and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst its
splendours of band and bead seemed instinct with the same tremulous
courage that possessed her.

The features about the roots of her nose wrinkled with determination.
She had had enough of it! All alone there! Skinner might come back there
if he liked.

She went out by the front door, going that way not because she wanted to
go to Hickleybrow (her goal was Cheasing Eyebright, where her married
daughter resided), but because the back door was impassable on account
of the canary creeper that had been growing so furiously ever since she
upset the can of food near its roots. She listened for a space and
closed the front door very carefully behind her.

At the corner of the house she paused and reconnoitred....

An extensive sandy scar upon the hillside beyond the pine-woods marked
the nest of the giant Wasps, and this she studied very earnestly. The
coming and going of the morning was over, not a wasp chanced to be in
sight then, and except for a sound scarcely more perceptible than a
steam wood-saw at work amidst the pines would have been, everything was
still. As for earwigs, she could see not one. Down among the cabbage
indeed something was stirring, but it might just as probably be a cat
stalking birds. She watched this for a time.

She went a few paces past the corner, came in sight of the run
containing the giant chicks and stopped again. "Ah!" she said, and shook
her head slowly at the sight of them. They were at that time about the
height of emus, but of course much thicker in the body--a larger thing
altogether. They were all hens and five all told, now that the two
cockerels had killed each other. She hesitated at their drooping
attitudes. "Poor dears!" she said, and put down her bundle; "they've got
no water. And they've 'ad no food these twenty-four hours! And such
appetites, too, as they 'ave!" She put a lean finger to her lips and
communed with herself.

Then this dirty old woman did what seems to me a quite heroic deed of
mercy. She left her bundle and umbrella in the middle of the brick path
and went to the well and d