Ann Smith 
welled up. During a discussion about some 
needlework measurements she sat one day in un- 
wonted silence, tightening her pocket-handkerchief 
round her wrist. Then she held out the measure- 
ment thus obtained. ‘‘ That’s six inches,” she said. 
On its being tested with a tape it proved to be 
six and a quarter inches; but the folk method 
of measuring was none the less acceptable; it 
seemed so suggestive of old workrooms and old 
devices for meeting long-forgotten difficulties, 
With a sentiment of affeétion—because her mother 
had been wont to do just that thing in the old 
home at Farnborough, where also her father had 
done it “for luck” as long ago as she could 
remember—she hung a bunch of hops year by 
year in her little sitting-room at Farnham. But 
without any such reminder in my house, she 
seemed to be always recalling, and always happily, 
the farm and her young days. One early July, 
after a prolonged rain, she repeated the ancient 
village jest that the rain would spoil all the little 
potatoes—by “turning ’em into big ’uns !” 
“I wonder how many people have been saying 
that this morning!” she exclaimed, in a sort of 
quiet merriment. Were not the far-off, easy- 
hearted days still alive in her? One had that 
feeling. She must have been thinking of her 
father. And in fact a perpetual recollection 
of the older time seems to have run through her 
brain, in never-ending comment on modern 
197 
