“It was this way,” said the tailor. Then he turned, in his inconsequent way to me. “I wonder,” he said, “if, as you’re so kind as to take an interest, you’d care to see our cottage. We’d be proud, my sister and I, if you would come. If you are just walking about for pleasure, perhaps you’d come down as far as that one day and—and, well, sir, it’s very humble, but we’d do our best.”
“When shall you be there?” I said. “Because I want to come very much.”
“I’m going back; I’m on my way now,” he said; “I always go back two or three times in the summer just to tell her the news. I tell her what’s happened, and what flowers they grow where I’ve been. If you would really come, sir, perhaps you’d come in three weeks from now, if you have nothing better to do. I’d let her know.”
“Then she could tell me the story of the tombstone herself?” I said.
It ended at that. He wrote the address for me in my sketch-book, and took his leave of me in characteristic fashion.
“I hope I’m not taking a liberty,” he said, as he jerked his knapsack into a comfortable place between his shoulders.
“There’s nothing I should like better,” said I.
“You’ll like the garden,” he said as an inducement.
And this was how I came to hear the story of the “Tailor’s Sister’s Tombstone.”