CHAPTER II.
July 4th.
Enter the family of Thornycroft Farm, of which I am already a member in good and regular standing.
I introduce Mrs.Heaven first, for she is a self-saturated person who would never forgive the insult should she receive any lower place.
She welcomed me with the statement: "We do not take lodgers here, nor boarders; no lodgers, nor boarders, but we do occasionally admit paying guests, those who look as if they would appreciate the quietude of the plyce and be willing as you might say to remunerate according." {Mrs.Heaven: p10.jpg} I did not mind at this particular juncture what I was called, so long as the epithet was comparatively unobjectionable, so I am a paying guest, therefore, and I expect to pay handsomely for the handsome appellation.
Mrs.Heaven is short and fat; she fills her dress as a pin-cushion fills its cover; she wears a cap and apron, and she is so full of platitudes that she would have burst had I not appeared as a providential outlet for them.

Her accent is not of the farm, but of the town, and smacks wholly of the marts of trade.

She is repetitious, too, as well as platitudinous.

"I 'ope if there's anythink you require you will let us know, let us know," she says several times each day; and whenever she enters my sitting-room she prefaces her conversation with the remark: "I trust you are finding it quiet here, miss?
It's the quietude of the plyce that is its charm, yes, the quietude.

And yet" (she dribbles on) "it wears on a body after a while, miss.