An old woman, very little and bent, and dressed in an odd and ugly costume, met us at the door, dropping a courtesy to me, and looking at me with dim, watery eyes.

I was about to speak to her, when Tardif bent down his head, and put his mouth to her ear, shouting to her with a loud voice, but in their peculiar jargon, of which I could not make out a single word.
"My poor mother is deaf," he said to me, "very deaf; neither can she speak English.

Most of the young people in Sark can talk in English a little, but she is old and too deaf to learn.

She has only once been off the island." I looked at her, wondering for a moment what she could have to think of, but, with an intelligible gesture of welcome, she beckoned me into my own room.

The aspect of it was somewhat dreary; the walls were of bare plaster, but dazzlingly white, with one little black _silhouette_ of a woman's head hanging in a common black frame over the low, open hearth, on which a fire of seaweed was smouldering, with a quantity of gray ashes round the small centre of smoking embers.