The Affair at the Inn

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin; Jane Helen Findlater; Mary Findlater; Allan McAulay

Miss Cecilia Evesham, Mrs. MacGill's companion, by Jane Findlater, Author of 'The Green Graves of Balgowrie,' etc.

Sir Archibald Maxwell Mackenzie, of Kindarroch, N.B., by Allan McAulay, Author of 'The Rhymer,' etc.

THE AFFAIR AT THE INN

I

VIRGINIA POMEROY

Dartmoor, Devonshire,
The Grey Tor Inn,
Tuesday, May 18th, 19—

When my poor father died five years ago, the doctor told my mother that she must have an entire change. We left America at once, and we have been travelling ever since, always in the British Isles, as the sound of foreign languages makes mamma more nervous. As a matter of fact, the doctor did not advise eternal change, but that is the interpretation mamma has placed upon his command, and so we are for ever moving on, like What's-his-name in Bleak House. It is not so extraordinary, then, that we are in the Devonshire moorlands, because one cannot travel incessantly for four years in the British Isles without being everywhere, in course of time. That is what I said to a disagreeable, frumpy Englishwoman in the railway carriage yesterday.

'I have no fault to find with Great Britain,' I said, 'except that it is so circumscribed! I have outgrown my first feeling, which was a fear of falling off the edge; but I still have a sensation of being cabined, cribbed, confined.'

She remarked that she had always preferred a small, perfectly finished, and well-managed estate to a large, rank, wild, and overgrown one, and I am bound to say that I think the retort was a good one. It must have been, for it silenced me.