to Mrs. M'Collop. She has a nice ladylike appearance, but when she takes her bonnet off she looks seventy years old."
"She ought always to keep it off, then," returned Francesca, "for she looked eighty with it on. We shall have to soothe her last moments, of course, and pay her funeral expenses. Did you offer her a cup of tea and show her the box-bed?"
"Yes; she said she was muckle obleeged to me, but the coals were so poor and hard she couldna batter them up to start a fire the nicht, and she would try the box-bed to see if she could sleep in it. I am glad to remember that it was you who telegraphed for her, Penelope."
"Let there be no recriminations," I responded; "let us stand shoulder to shoulder in this calamity,—isn't there a story called 'Calamity Jane?' We might live at the inn, and give her the cottage for a summer residence, but I utterly refuse to be parted from our cat and the 1602 lintel."
After I have once described Miss Grieve I shall not suffer her to begloom these pages as she did our young lives. She is so exactly like her kind in America that she cannot be looked upon as a national type. Everywhere we go we see fresh, fair-haired, sonsie lassies; why should we have been visited with this affliction, we who have no courage in a foreign land to rid ourselves of it?
