the mantelpiece, indicating by a subtle air of superiority that this was

not merely a place for cooking, which was, indeed, chiefly carried on in the adjacent scullery, but the common room, the living room of the house where its inhabitants partook of meals, spent their leisure, and congregated in their family life.

At present the hands of the ornate clock showed twenty minutes past five, and old Grandma Brodie sat in her corner chair by the range, making toast for tea. She was a large-boned, angular woman shrunken but not withered by her seventy-two years, shrivelled and knotted like the bole of a sapless tree, dried but still hard and resilient, toughened by age and the seasons she had seen. Her hands, especially, were gnarled, the joints nodular with arthritis. Her face had the colour of a withered leaf and was seamed and cracked with wrinkles;

the features were large, masculine and firm; her hair, still black, was parted evenly in the middle, showing a straight white furrow of scalp, and drawn tight into a hard knob behind; some coarse short straggling hairs sprouted erratically like weeds from her chin and upper lip. She wore a black bodice and shawl, a small black mutch, a long trailing skirt of the same colour and elastic-sided boots which, although large, plainly showed the protuberance of her bunions and

the flatness of her well-trodden feet.

As she crouched over the fire, the mutch slightly askew from her exertions, supporting the toasting fork with both tremulous hands, she toasted two slices of bread with infinite care, thick pieces which she browned over gently, tenderly, leaving the inside soft, and when she had completed these to her satisfaction and placed them on that side of the plate where she might reach out quickly and remove them adroitly at once, whenever the family sat down to tea, she consummated the rest of her toasting negligently, without interest. While