THE PAINTED LADY It had been the ordinary dwelling room of the unknown poor, the mean little "end"-- ah, no, no, the noblest chamber in the annals of the Scottish nation.

Here on a hard anvil has its character been fashioned and its history made at rush-lights and its God ever most prominent.
Always within reach of hands which trembled with reverence as they turned its broad page could be found the Book that is compensation for all things, and that was never more at home than on bare dressers and worm-eaten looms.

If you were brought up in that place and have forgotten it, there is no more hope for you.
But though still recalling its past, the kitchen into which Tommy and Elspeth peered was trying successfully to be something else.

The plate-rack had been a fixture, and the coffin-bed and the wooden bole, or board in the wall, with its round hole through which you thrust your hand when you wanted salt, and instead of a real mantelpiece there was a quaint imitation one painted over the fireplace.

There were some pieces of furniture too, such as were usual in rooms of the kind, but most of them, perhaps in ignorance, had been put to novel uses, like the plate-rack, where the Painted Lady kept her many pretty shoes instead of her crockery.