spaces like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the
floor of which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-
place was in a dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow,
propped up behind with one great angular black bolster like the
block at a state execution in the good old times, sat his mother in
a widow's dress.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest
remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid
silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other,
had been the peacefullest occupation of his childhood. She gave
him one glassy kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted.
This embrace concluded, he sat down on the opposite side of her
little table. There was a fire in the grate, as there had been
night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on the hob, as
there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a little
mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little
mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and
day for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the
airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and
stuff of the widow's dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-
like sofa for fifteen years.

'Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.'

'The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,' she rep lied,
glancing round the room. 'It is well for me that I never set my
heart upon its hollow vanities.'

The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so