"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's sent you some waffles for supper."
"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the red and white napkin which covered the gift.
"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."
"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see me."
"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew, his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico, with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in the back.
"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an' she lives around the corner."
"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"
"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"
This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs. Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.
"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small, half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo' po' ma's—the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the mornin' arter I buried my man."