Poor Jane always wore a brown, muddy, gingham skirt, frayed and tattered, and the torn pieces hung like a frill from her knees to the tops of her dust-coloured boots. Over her chest she wore a dark-grey woollen cross-over, and on her head was a dirty shawl, which hung down her back, and was pinned across her breast. Little straw-like wisps of straight brown hair stuck out from under the shawl over her forehead and ears. Her face was dried up and shrivelled, and her cheek-bones were so sharp that they tried to prick through the skin.
Poor Jane did not often wash, so her wrinkles, and what Dumpty called her "laughing lines," were marked quite black with dirt. Her lips were not rosy and fresh like mummie's or Dumpty's, but they were of a purple-grey colour, and when she opened her mouth, instead of a row of pearly white teeth showing, there was only one very large yellow tooth, which looked as if it could not stay much longer in the gum.
The twins always thought that she must live on milk, as babies do before they have any teeth, but to their amazement they heard that last Christmas, at the Old People's Tea, Poor Jane had eaten two plates of salt beef.
"Do you think she sucked it?" Dumpty asked her brother that evening when nurse was safely out of the way. Humpty asked daddy the next day at lunch how old people managed to eat when they had only one tooth.
Humpty's Experiment
Daddy said they "chewed," and showed Humpty how it was done, and there was a scene that afternoon in the nursery at tea, when Humpty practised "chewing" his bread and honey. And in the end Dumpty went down alone to the drawing-room for games that evening, with this message from Nan: "Master Humphrey has behaved badly at the tea-table, and been sent to bed."
BARBARA'S VISIT.
But although the children met Poor Jane every time that they went into the village they had never once spoken to her. That was because she was not one of nurse's friends, like old Mrs. Jenks, whom Barbara, the twins' elder sister, visited every week with flowers or fruit or other good things. Nan considered that Poor Jane was too dirty for one of her friends.