There, under the heading—
“A Dainty Cosy-Comfort for your Boy in the Trenches,”
it described how to make a pair of wool-work slippers, commencing with “Get a yard of Penelope canvas.”
Then Mrs. Jones was uneasy about her step-daughter, Kathleen, who was in service near Chepstow. “The food’s all right; but the lady isn’t what I call a good wife—never thinks of brushing her husband’s best clothes and putting them away for him of a Monday morning, and yet I’ve never once missed doing that since I married Jones. And I assure you, when I married him, he hadn’t a darned sock to his back. I’m sorry Kathleen hasn’t a better example before her, for she’s inclined to be flighty. She’s got a week’s holiday next month, and nothing will do but she must go and visit her cousin, who is working at munitions in Cardiff. I say to her, ‘Cardiff’s a nasty noisy place; why don’t you go and visit your Aunt Lizzie at Penglyn, she’s so worried she can hardly hold her head up some days, and cries from morning till night; and would be thankful to have someone to talk things over with; or your father’s Cousin Ann at Caerleon, they’ve had a sight of trouble there, and never see a soul nor go out of the house from week end to week end; they’d love to have you.’ But no, it’s Cardiff she wants,” and Mrs. Jones sighed at the unaccountable taste of one-and-twenty!
“Ah, no one knows what an anxiety that girl’s been to me,” went on the buxom, good-natured woman, who in reality never makes a trouble of anything, and has been a real mother to Kathleen. “I sometimes wonder why I married her father! But there, I will say it looks better on your tombstone to have ‘The beloved wife of,’ rather than plain Martha Miggins (as I was), all unbelongst to no one, as it were.”
Don’t imagine for a moment that this implied matrimonial divergence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a more contented couple you couldn’t find in the village. It is merely the polite way we have, locally, of discounting our blessings, lest we should seem to be flaunting our happiness in the face of less fortunate people.
“By the way,” she said, as we were going out of the door, “have you heard who it was walked around your place the other night? Well, now, to think I should have forgotten to mention it, but it was no one, after all, but the policeman! My husband was over to the police-station this morning about that mare we’ve lost, and he mentioned it; and, sure enough, the policeman had got it down in his book that he crossed the hill by our road that night, and had looked over your house.”
And then I remembered that there was a police-station in the next village, that did duty for a very wide area of miles. And it was usual for the policeman to patrol from one village to another, by various routes, last thing at night, ascertaining if the inhabitants’ doors en route were all duly locked. We were much relieved in our minds, and started for home discussing the situation, when Virginia suddenly said—
“Surely that is our dog barking further along the lane?”