they used to have when you and I were young. Your son, I suppose,
come home from sea or something? He's in the fish-curing line,
isn't he, I think I've heard you say?'

'I don't rightly know who 'ee may mean, Miss Luttrell,' replied
the mother proudly, 'by a young man lounging about the place; but
my son's at home from Oxford at present for his vacations, and he
isn't in the fish-curing line at all, ma'am, but he's a Fellow of
his college, as I've told 'ee more than once already; but you're
getting old, I see, Miss Luttrell, and your memory isn't just what
it had used to be, dost know.'

'Oh, at Oxford, is he?' Miss Luttrell chimed on vacantly, wagging
her wrinkled old head in solemn deprecation of tke evil omen. She
knew it as well as Mrs. Oswald herself did, having heard the fact
at least a thousand times before; but she made it a matter of
principle never to encourage these upstart pretensions on the part
of the lower orders, and just to keep them rigorously at their
proper level she always made a feint of forgetting any steps in
advance which they might have been bold enough to take, without
humbly obtaining her previous permission, out of their original
and natural obscurity. 'Fellow of his college is he, really? Fellow
of a college! Dear me, how completely Oxford is going to the dogs.
Admitting all kinds of odd people into the University, I understand.
Why, my second brother--the Archdeacon, you know--was a Fellow of
Magdalen for some time in his younger days. You surprise me, quite.
Fellow of a college! You're perfectly sure he isn't a National
schoolmaster at Oxford instead, and that you and his father haven't
got the two things mixed up together in your heads, Mrs. Oswald?'