of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little and with her head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief which has made all things else a weariness has itself become weary, she looks down pensively at her bracelets and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state.

Mrs Pullet brushed each doorpost with great nicety, about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having done that sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh tears as she advanced into the parlour where Mrs Glegg was seated.

`Well, sister, you're late: what's the matter?' said Mrs Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands.

Mrs Pullet sat down - lifting up her mantle carefully behind before she answered, `She's gone,' unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric.

`It isn't the glass this time, then,' thought Mrs Tulliver.

`Died the day before yesterday,' continued Mrs Pullet. `An' her legs was as thick as my body,' she added, with deep sadness, after a pause. `They'd tapped her no end o'times, they say you might ha' swum in the water as came from her.'

`Well, Sophy, it's a mercy she's gone, then, whoiver she may be,' said Mrs Glegg with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; `but I can't think who you're talking of, for my part.'

`But I know,' said Mrs Pullet, sighing and shaking her head, `and there isn't another such a dropsy in the parish. I know as it's old Mrs Sutton o' the Twentylands.'

`Well, she's no kin o' yours, nor much acquaintance as I've ever heared of,' said Mrs Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own `kin' but not on other occasions.

`She's so much acquaintance as I've seen her legs when they was like bladders... . And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn't many old parish'ners like her, I doubt.'

`And they say she'd took as much physic as 'ud fill a waggon,' observed Mr Pullet.

`Ah,' sighed Mrs Pullet, `she'd another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn't make out what it was. And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, `Mrs Pullet, if iver you have the dropsy, you'll think o' me.' She did say so,' added Mrs Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again, `those were her very words. And she's to be buried o' Saturday, and Pullet's bid to the funeral.'

`Sophy,' said Mrs Glegg, unable any longer to contain her spirit of rational remonstrance, `Sophy, I wonder at you, fretting and injuring your health about people as don't belong to you. Your poor father never did so, nor your aunt Frances neither, nor any o' the family as I ever heared of. You couldn't fret no more than this, if we'd heared as our cousin Abbott had died sudden without making his will.'

Mrs Pullet was silent, having to finish her crying, and rather flattered than indignant at being upbraided for crying too much. It was not everybody who could afford to cry so much about their neighbours who had left them nothing; but Mrs Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.

`Mrs Sutton didn't die without making her will, though,' said Mr Pullet, with a confused sense that he was saying something to sanction his wife's tears; `ours is a rich parish, but they say there's nobody else to