or thick with dust. The bed, table,
chairs, washhandstand, toilet service--the things she had been so long
struggling to get together, saving her money for months and months, and
making so many journeys to the town to buy--all, all he had taken away
and sold for almost nothing!

Then, actually with tears in her eyes, she said that now we knew why she
couldn't take us in--why she had to seem so unkind.

But we are going to stay, we told her. It was a very good room; she
could surely get a few things to put in it, and in the meantime we would
go and forage for provisions to last us till Monday.

It is odd to find how easy it is to get what one wants by simply taking
it! At first she was amazed at our decision, then she was delighted and
said she would go out to her neighbours and try to borrow all that was
wanted in the way of furniture and bedding. Then we returned to Mr.
Brownjohn's to buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us
to Mr. Marling for vegetables. Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly taking
up a spade and other implements led us out to his garden and dug us a
mess of potatoes while we waited. In the meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew
had not been idle, and we formed the idea that her neighbours must have
been her debtors for unnumbered little kindnesses, so eager did they now
appear to do her a good turn. Out of one cottage a woman was seen coming
burdened with a big roll of bedding; from others children issued bearing
cane chairs, basin and ewer, and so on, and when we next looked into
our room we found it swept and scrubbed, mats on the floor, and quite
comfortably furnished.

After our meal in the small parlour, which had been given up to us, the
family having migrated into the kitchen, we sat for an hour by the open
window looking out on the dim forest and saw the moon rise--a great
golden globe above the trees--and listened to the reeling of the
nightjars. So many were the birds, reeling on all sides, at various
distances, that the evening air seemed full of their sounds, far and
near, like many low, tremulous, sustained notes blown on reeds, rising
and falling, overlapping and mingling. And presently from the bushes
close by, just beyond the weedy, forlorn little "orchard," sounded
the rich, full, throbbing prelude to the nightingale's song, and that
powerful melody that in its purity and brilliance invariably strikes us
with surprise seemed to shine out, as it were, against the background of
th