have time to notice the change of the seasons. There
is no hurry at Slumberleigh. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter, each in
their turn, take quite a year to come and go. Three months ago it was
August; now September had arrived. It was actually the time of damsons.
Those damsons which Ruth had seen dangling for at least three years in
the cottage orchards were ripe at last. It seemed ages ago since April,
when the village was a foaming mass of damson blossom, and the "plum
winter" had set in just when spring really seemed to have arrived for
good. It was a well-known thing in Slumberleigh, though Ruth till last
April had not been aware of it, that God Almighty always sent cold
weather when the Slumberleigh damsons were in bloom, to harden the
fruit. And now the lame, the halt, and the aged of Slumberleigh, all
with one consent, mounted on tottering ladders to pick their damsons, or
that mysterious fruit, closely akin to the same, called "black Lamas
ploums."

There were plum accidents, of course, in plenty. The Lord took Mrs.
Eccles's own uncle from his half-filled basket to another world, for
which, as a "tea and coffee totaller," he was no doubt well prepared.
The too receptive organisms of unsuspecting infancy suffered in their
turn. In short, it was a busy season for Mr. and Mrs. Alwynn.

Ruth had plenty of opportunities now for making her long-projected
sketch of the ruined house of Arleigh, for the old woman who lived in
the lodge close by, and had charge of the place, had "ricked" her back
in a damson-tree, and Ruth often went to see her. She had been Ruth's
nurse in her childhood, and having originally come from Slumberleigh,
returned there when the Deyncourt children grew up, and lived happily
ever after, with the very blind and entirely deaf old husband of her
choice, in the gray stone lodge at Arleigh.

It was on her return from one of these almost daily visits that Mrs.
Eccles pounced on Ruth as she passed her gate, and under pretence of
inquiring after Mrs. Cotton, informed her that she herself was suffering
in no slight degree. Ruth, who suddenly remembered that she had been
remiss in "dropping in" on Mrs. Eccles of late, dropped in then and
there to make up for past delinquencies.

"Is it rheumatism again?" she asked, as Mrs. Eccles seemed inclined to
run off at once into a report of the goings on of Widow Jones's Sally.

"Not that, my dear, so much as a sinking," said Mrs. Eccles, passing her
han