glect
it; leaving it on chairs or on the settle by the fireplace, like Ariadne
on Naxos; evidently feeling, when he was recalled to his duty towards
it, as Theseus might have felt if remonstrated with by Minos for his
desertion of his daughter. In reinstating it he would be acting for the
crutch's sake. And why should he trouble to do this, when the other
little boy, Marmaduke, who had nothing whatever the matter with _his_
leg, was always ambitious to use this crutch, or scrutch. He was the
Dionysos of the metaphor.

However, the crutch was not in question when Dave first set eyes on
Granny Marrable. It was at half-past seven o'clock on a cold morning,
when the last swallow had departed, and the skylarks were flagging, and
the tragedy of the ash-leaves was close at hand, that Dave awoke
reluctantly from a remote dream-world with Dolly in it, and Uncle Mo,
and Aunt M'riar, and Mrs. Picture upstairs, to hear a voice, that at
first seemed Mrs. Picture's in the dream, saying: "Well, my little
gentleman, you _do_ sleep sound!"

But it wasn't Mrs. Prichard's, or Picture's, voice; it was Granny
Marrable's. For all her eighty years, she had walked from Costrell's
farm, her great-grandson's birthplace, three miles off, or thereabouts;
and had arrived at her own door, ten minutes since, quite fresh after an
hour's walk. She was that sort of old woman.

Dave was almost as disconcerted as when he woke at the Hospital and saw
no signs of his home, and no old familiar faces. He sat up in bed and
wrestled with his difficulties, his eyelids being among the chief. If he
rubbed them hard enough, no doubt the figure before him would cease to
be Mrs. Picture, even as the other figure the dream had left had ceased
to be Aunt M'riar, and had become Widow Thrale. Not but that he would
have accepted her as Mrs. Picture, being prepared for almost anything
since his accident, if it had not been for the expression, "My little
gentleman," which quarrelled with her seeming identity. Oh no!--if he
rubbed away hard enough at those eyes with his nightgown-sleeve, this
little matter would right itself. Of course, Mrs. Picture would have
called him Doyvy, or the name he gave that inflection to.

"Child!--you'll rub your pretty eyes out that fashion," said Granny
Marrable. And she uncrumpled Dave's small nightgown-sleeve the eyes were
in collision with, and disentangled their owner from the recesses of his
bedclothes. Then Dave was quite convinced i