Only poor Griffey--oh dear! oh dear!--was never knowing that, because I did be hiding it from him as much as I could.' Whilst the widow talks on in this strain to her sympathising friends, her son and Rowland Prothero are in another small room of the house, engaged in a very different style of conversation.

The room in which they are is worth a few words of description, not for any beauty or desert of its own, but for its heterogeneous, contents.

You would think a small music warehouse, a miniature tobacco shop, or branch depot of foreign grammars and dictionaries were before you.

Every kind of musical instrument seems to have met with a companion in this tiny apartment.
Here are a violin, violoncello, horn, and cornopean; there an old Welsh harp and unstrung guitar.

On this shelf are pipes of all sorts and sizes, forms, and nations--the straight English, the short German, and the long Turkish; on that are cigar-boxes, snuff-boxes, and tobacco-boxes of various kinds and appearances.