“Oh, this is just a new zinc pail” (shaking the musical packet), “we need an extra one; and I’ve put in a little iron shovel, as I want one for my kitchen scuttle: and there’s a nutmeg grater too; the one down there is getting rusty. And this” (nodding towards her chest) “is an enamel washing-up bowl. Our big one down there leaks.”
And she proceeded serenely on her way to the accompaniment of iron shovel clink-clanging against zinc pail, with the nutmeg-grater tintinnabulating cheerfully in a higher key—and evidently pleased at the public interest she was arousing.
Not that her surprises are always so useful. On one occasion I noticed she had brought two collapsible straw baskets, but concluded she had some very special new frocks for the flower show. The porter disposed of the luggage—while Abigail was looking the bookstall over. When she returned and found both baskets missing, she rushed to the guard’s van. Soon things were being dragged out again, Abigail excitedly urging haste. The guard helped, Abigail assisting with much conversation.
Eventually she lugged one basket up to her own compartment, scorning the help of the penitent porter. As she passed my compartment, a heartrending “mee-au” came from the basket.
“What in the world—!!—!!!” I began.
“It’s only Angelina,” Abigail explained. “She hasn’t seemed well lately. I thought a change of air might do her good. Only it gave me a bit of a fright when I found they’d put her in the van, thinking she was luggage!”
(Incidentally, Angelina is my cat.)
Being my own place and not someone else’s we are going to, it occasionally happens that there are items of furnishing that need to go down, a mirror, for instance, that is too large to pack in a trunk. Strictly speaking, the railway company might be within their rights if they argued that such things could not legitimately be called passenger’s luggage; but Virginia said, with regard to the mirror—4 feet × 2—that if they objected to take it, she should tell them every woman is entitled to carry a mirror among her personal luggage.
Fortunately no one so far has objected to any of the details of our impedimenta, so long as the excess charges are promptly paid. We usually go down with the same guard. I tell him what the contraband is. He carries the parcel off majestically, assuring me that his one eye won’t leave it all the way down, no matter where the other may be focused; and he begs me to have no anxiety as to its safety. I haven’t. I know from long experience that the guards and officials on the G.W.R. have elevated politeness and courtesy from a mere duty to a fine art.
Sometimes I almost wish they wouldn’t take quite such care of our things! There was the brown pitcher, for instance. I had been wanting a very large one for fetching the water from the spring outside the cottage gate. Of course, I know you can get big enamel jugs (painted duck-egg blue, or anything else in the art line that you fancy); but the latter seems so strident, so townified, so newly-rich, so over-dressed, when you see them beside our moss-grown wooden spout, where the mountain spring splashes down into a stony hollow, among ferns and long mosses. The sturdy but humble brown pitcher tones in better with the pale yellow sand in the bottom of the hollow, the browns and greys and greens of the stones and growing things all round. The very water falls into it with a mellow musical sound, instead of the hollow tinny ring that the enamelled creature gives forth.