or less broken by the children's racket.
Over the pictures on the warm W. wall--against which, on the other
side, the neighbour's kitchener stands--is a line of clean
underclothing, hung there to air. The dresser is littered with fishing
lines as well as with dry provisions and its proper complement of odd
pieces of china. Beneath the table and each of the larger chairs are
boots and slippers in various stages of polish or decay. Every jug not
in daily use, every pot and vase, and half the many drawers, contain
lines, copper nails, sail-thimbles and needles, spare blocks and
pulleys, rope ends and twine. But most characteristic of the kitchen
(the household teapot excepted) are the navy-blue garments and jerseys,
drying along the line and flung over chairs, together with innumerable
photographs of Tony and all his kin, the greater number of them in
seafaring rig.

Specially do I like the bluejacket photographs; magnificent men, some
of them, though one strong fellow looks more than comical, seated amid
the photographer's rustic properties with a wreath of artificial fern
leaves around him and a broadly smiling Jolly-Jack-Tar face protruding
from the foliage. Some battleships, pitching and tossing in fearful
photographers' gales[3] and one or two framed memorial cards complete
the kitchen picture gallery.

[3] Composite pictures apparently; made from a photograph of a
ship and of a bad painting of a hurricane.

It is a place of many smells which, however, form a not disagreeable
blend.

An untidy room--yes. An undignified room--no. Kitchen; scullery (the
scullery proper is cramped and its damp floor bad for the feet); eating
room; sitting room; reception room; storeroom; treasure-house; and at
times a wash-house,--it is an epitome of the household's activities and
a reflexion of the family's world-wide seafaring. Devonshire is the sea
county--at every port the Devonian dialect. It is probably the pictures
and reminders of the broad world which, by contrast, make Mrs Tony's
kitchen so very homely.

5

[Sidenote: _A DUTCH AUCTION_]

Almost every evening, just now, Mrs Widger goes off to a Dutch auction
of hardware and trinkets at the Market House. She usually brings home
some small purchase, worth about half the money she has paid; but if
she were to go to an entertainment at the Seacombe Hall she would be
not nearly so well amused as by the auctioneer and the other
housewives, and at the end of th