The upshot of my perplexities was that I set off to Mycening to lay
them before Miss Woolmer, another of the few belonging to neither
clan, to know what all this meant, as well as to be interested in my
nephews.

Mycening is one of the prettiest country towns I know, at least it
was twenty years ago. There is a very wide street, unpaved, but with
a broad smooth gravelled way, slightly sloping down towards the
little clean stone-edged gutters that border the carriage road along
the centre, which is planted on each side with limes cut into arches.
The houses are of all sorts, some old timbered gable-ended ones with
projecting upper stories, like our own, others of the handsome old
Queen Anne type with big sash windows, and others quite modern. Some
have their gardens in front, some stand flush with the road, and the
better sort are mixed with the shops and cottages.

Miss Woolmer lived in a tiny low one, close to the road, where, from
her upstairs floor, she saw all that came and went, and, intellectual
woman as she certainly was, she thoroughly enjoyed watching her
neighbours, as by judiciously-arranged looking-glasses, she could do
all up and down the street. I believe she had been a pretty woman,
though on a small scale, and now she had bright eyes, and a very
sweet bright look, though in complexion she had faded into the worn
pallor that belongs to permanent ill health. She dressed nicely, and
if she had been well, might, at her age, scarcely above forty, have
been as much a young lady as Philippa Horsman; but I fancy the great
crush of her life had taken away her girlhood and left her no spring
of constitution to resist illness, so that she had sunk into a
regular crippled invalid before I could remember, though her mind was