'Ah,' Mrs.Hackit thought to herself, 'I daresay we shall have a sharp pinch this winter, and if we do, I shouldn't wonder if it takes the old lady off.

They say a green Yule makes a fat churchyard; but so does a white Yule too, for that matter.

When the stool's rotten enough, no matter who sits on it.' However, on her arrival at Cross Farm, the prospect of Mrs.Patten's decease was again thrown into the dim distance in her imagination, for Miss Janet Gibbs met her with the news that Mrs.Patten was much better, and led her, without any preliminary announcement, to the old lady's bedroom.

Janet had scarcely reached the end of her circumstantial narrative how the attack came on and what were her aunt's sensations--a narrative to which Mrs.Patten, in her neatly-plaited nightcap, seemed to listen with a contemptuous resignation to her niece's historical inaccuracy, contenting herself with occasionally confounding Janet by a shake of the head--when the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the yard pavement announced the arrival of Mr.Pilgrim, whose large, top-booted person presently made its appearance upstairs.

He found Mrs.Patten going on so well that there was no need to look solemn.