eople, never became wearisome, and
certainly Nurse was never tired of telling them. Her listeners knew
them almost by heart, and if by any chance she missed some small detail,
it was at once demanded with a sense of injury.

Pennie, in particular, drank in her words eagerly, and would sit
entranced gazing with an ever-new interest at the relics of the "family"
with which the little room was filled. Hanging by the fireplace was a
very faded kettle-holder, worked in pink and green wool by Miss Mary,
now Mrs Hawthorne; on the mantel-piece a photograph of a family group,
in which Miss Mary appeared at the age of ten in a plaid poplin frock,
low in the neck and short in the sleeves, with her hair in curls; on
each side of her stood a brother with a grave face and a short jacket.

There was a great deal to be told about this picture. Nurse remembered,
she said, as if it was yesterday, the day it was "took." Master Owen
had a swollen cheek, and had cried and said he did not want his picture
done, but he had been promised a pop-gun if he stood still, and had then
submitted. And that was why he stood side-face in the photograph, while
Master Charles faced you. It was almost past belief to Pennie and Nancy
that Uncle Owen, who was now a tall man with a long beard, had ever been
that same puffy-cheeked little boy, bribed to stand-still by a pop-gun.

There were also on the mantel-piece two white lions or "monsters," as
Nurse called them, presented by Miss Prissy, and quite a number of small
ornaments given from time to time by the Hawthorne children themselves.
But perhaps the crowning glory of Nurse's room was a sampler worked by
herself when a girl. Pennie looked at this with an almost fearful
admiration, for the number of tiny stitches in it were terrible to think
of. "I'm glad people don't have to work samplers now," she often said.
This was indeed a most wonderful sampler, and it hung against the wall
framed and glazed as it well deserved, a lasting example of industry and
eyesight. At the top sat the prophet Elijah under a small green bush
receiving the ravens, who carried in their beaks neat white bundles of
food. Next came the alphabet, all the big letters first, and then a row
of small ones. Then the Roman numerals up to a hundred, then a verse of
poetry:--

"Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away,
They fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the break of day."

And then Nurse's name, "