subject to her again. She has a great number of pensioners: and
on Saturday, after she comes back from market, there is a regular
levee of old men and women in the passage, waiting for their weekly
gratuity. Her name always heads the list of any benevolent
subscriptions, and hers are always the most liberal donations to
the Winter Coal and Soup Distribution Society. She subscribed
twenty pounds towards the erection of an organ in our parish
church, and was so overcome the first Sunday the children sang to
it, that she was obliged to be carried out by the pew-opener. Her
entrance into church on Sunday is always the signal for a little
bustle in the side aisle, occasioned by a general rise among the
poor people, who bow and curtsey until the pew-opener has ushered
the old lady into her accustomed seat, dropped a respectful
curtsey, and shut the door: and the same ceremony is repeated on
her leaving church, when she walks home with the family next door
but one, and talks about the sermon all the way, invariably opening
the conversation by asking the youngest boy where the text was.

Thus, with the annual variation of a trip to some quiet place on
the sea-coast, passes the old lady's life. It has rolled on in the
same unvarying and benevolent course for many years now, and must
at no distant period be brought to its final close. She looks
forward to its termination, with calmness and without apprehension.
She has everything to hope and nothing to fear.

A very different personage, but one who has rendered himself very
conspicuous in our parish, is one of the old lady's next-door
neighbours. He is an old naval officer on half-pay, and his bluff
and unceremonious behaviour disturbs the old lady's domestic
economy, not a little. In the first place, he WILL smoke cigars in