said apologetically, and putting the sixpence
carefully back; but I believe he alluded to the cat.

I felt more and more strongly that he ought to invite us into the
parlour--if there was a parlour--and I took advantage of a backward
movement on his part to move one shallow step nearer, and said, in an
easy conversational tone, "Your cat has very curious eyes."

He came out again, and his own eyes glared in the evening light as he
touched me with one of his fingers in a way that made me shiver, and
said, "If I had been an old woman, and that cat had lived with me in the
days when this house was built, I should have been hanged, or burned as
a witch. Twelve men would have done it--twelve reasonable and
respectable men!" He paused, looking over my head at the sky, and then
added, "But in all good conscience--mind, in all good conscience!"

And after another pause he touched me again (this time my teeth
chattered), and whispered loudly in my ear, "Never serve on a jury."
After which he banged the door in our faces, and Jem caught hold of my
jacket and cried, "Oh! he's quite mad, he'll murder us!" and we took
each other by the hand and ran home as fast as our feet would carry us.

We never saw the old miser again, for he died some months afterwards,
and, strange to relate, Jem and I were invited to the funeral.

It was a funeral not to be forgotten. The old man had left the money for
it, and a memorandum, with the minutest directions, in the hands of his
lawyer. If he had wished to be more popular after his death than he had
been in his lifetime, he could not have hit upon any better plan to
conciliate in a lump the approbation of his neighbours than that of
providing for what undertakers call "a first-class funeral." The good
custom of honouring the departed, and committing their bodies to the
earth with care and respect, was carried, in our old-fashioned
neighbourhood, to a point at which what began in reverence ended in
what was barely decent, and what was meant to be most melancholy became
absolutely comical. But a sense of the congruous and the incongruous was
not cultivated amongst us, whereas solid value (in size, quantity and
expense) was perhaps over-estimated. So our furniture, our festivities,
and our funerals bore witness.

No one had ever seen the old miser's furniture, and he gave no
festivities; but he made up for it in his funeral.

Children, like other uneducated classes, enjoy domestic details, and