“Only I can’t help it,” she added.
“But you ought to,” was Dennis’s reply. “It’s silly, even for a girl, to be afraid of a turkey-cock.”
Old Sally’s thatched cottage was so near the farm-buildings that it almost looked like one of them, but a narrow lane really ran between, and it stood on its own little plot of ground. At its door there was an immense horse-chestnut, which she could “mind,” she said, helping to plant when she was a girl. She had held it straight in the hole while old Mr Solace, the grandfather of this young Master Andrew, had filled in the earth. She was most sorry to think she had done it now, for this ungrateful tree so shaded her window that it made her cottage dark, and besides this, choked up her well, by dropping its great leaves into it in the autumn.
Old Sally could “mind” so many things on account of her age, that she was a most amusing and instructive person to visit. She had worked for the Solaces as child, girl, and woman, and now she was pensioned off, and allowed to live in her cottage rent-free with her one remaining unmarried daughter, Anne, of whom she always spoke as her “good child.” Anne was over seventy years old, and weakly with bad health and rheumatism, so that there was nothing very youthful about her. Indeed, when they sat side by side, both in sunbonnets which they wore indoors and out, it was difficult to say which was the elder of the two old women.
Old Sally, in spite of a long life of hard work, was still straight and wiry, and her brown old face, wrinkled as a withered nut, was lively and shrewd. There was only one point in which Anne had the advantage, and that was in hearing, for her mother was very deaf, and obliged to use a trumpet. This she was always shy of producing, and to-day she allowed Anne to scream into her ear what the children said for some time; but at last, seeing a very earnest expression on Maisie’s face, she took the trumpet out with a bashful smile and presented the end to her.
“Do you know any one who wants a kitten?” shouted Maisie.
Old Sally laid down the trumpet and turned to Anne, who as usual sat at her elbow in her lilac sun-bonnet and coarse apron.
“Warn’t our Eliza talking of cats last time she was over?” she asked.
Anne nodded.
“Who’s Eliza?” inquired Dennis.