"Take care of that last step, child, it is quite worn away." And then, as they stood side by side in the dismal little area, he looked vainly for a bell.
Finally, he rapped so smartly at the door with Anna's sunshade that they distinctly heard an irate voice say, "Drat their imperence," and a tall, bony-looking woman, in a flowered gingham dress and a very red face, bounced out on them.
She was so tall and so excessively bony, and so altogether aggressive-looking, that Anna felt inclined to hide herself behind Malcolm.

Indeed, he remarked afterwards himself, that he had never seen a finer specimen of a muscular Christian, barring the Christianity, in his life.
"What's your pleasure ?" observed the Amazon, folding her arms in a defiant manner, while through the open door they could now hear distinctly the cobbler's subdued and singularly toneless voice meandering on--"O'er earth's green fields, and ocean's wave-beat shore." "Deuce take the man!" continued the woman wrathfully.

"Will you hold your old doddering tongue, Caleb, and let the gentlefolk speak!" But there was no cessation of the dreary, dirge-like sounds.

They found out afterwards that Caleb always worked with cotton-wool in his ears, so his wife's remonstrance failed to reach him.
"You see, it is like this, sir," he observed to Malcolm afterwards, when they became better acquainted with each other: "Ma'am's tongue is like a leaking water-butt.

It is bound to drip, drip from week's end to week's end, and there's no stopping it.