She gazed a while into the fire and said:
"Alice is dead."
"Yes, Alice is dead."
"And Jenny is dead."
"Yes, and Jenny. They are at the bottom of the sea."
In that way she counted a long list of the dead, which she closed by saying:
"They are all gone but Joe."
She had been a widow more than twenty-five years. She was a young woman, tall and strong, before Bonaparte, Wellington, the United States, or Australia, had ever been heard of in Lancashire, and from the top of a stile she had counted every windmill and chimney in Preston before it was covered with the black pall of smoke from the cotton-mills.