An old woman answered my knock.  She was tall, with a slight stoop, and a tinge of yellow pervading her face, as if some of the complexion had run into her teeth and the whites of her eyes.  A clean white cap, tied under the chin with tape, concealed all but the edge of her grey locks.  She wore a violet turnover, a large wrapper, a brown stuff gown that hardly reached her ankles, and thick worsted stockings, but no shoes.

“A drink o’ milk?  Why not a dish o’ tea?”

“That will be troubling you,” said I, a bit ashamed for feeling so little in want of sustenance.

“Few they be that troubles us, my dear.  Too few by land, an’ too many by sea, rest their dear souls!  Step inside by the fire.  There’s only my old man here, an’ you needn’t stand ‘pon ceremony wi’ he:  for he’s stone-deaf an’ totelin’.  Isaac, you poor deaf haddock, here’s a strange body for ‘ee to look at; tho’ you’m past all pomp but buryin’, I reckon.”  She sighed as I stepped past into the warmth.

The man she called Isaac was huddled and nodding in a chair, before the bluish blaze of a wreck-wood fire.  He met me with an incurious stare, and began to doze again.  He was clearly in the last decline of manhood, the stage of utter childishness and mere oblivion; and sat there with his faculties collapsed, waiting for release.

My mired boots played havoc with the neatly sanded floor; but the old woman dusted a chair for me as carefully as if I had worn robes of state, and set it on the other side of the hearth.  Then she put the kettle to boil, and unhitching a cup from the dresser, took a key from it, and opened a small cupboard between the fireplace and the wall.  That which she sought stood on the top shelf and she had to climb on a chair to reach it.  I offered my help:  but no—­she would get it herself.  It proved to be a small green canister.

The tea that came from this canister I wish I could describe.  No sooner did the boiling water touch it than the room was filled with fragrance.  The dotard in the chair drew a long breath through his nostrils, as though the aroma touched some quick centre in his moribund brain.  The woman poured out a cup, and I sipped it.

“Smuggled,” I thought to myself; for indeed you cannot get such tea in London if you pay fifty shillings a pound.

“You like it?” she asked.  Before I could answer, a small table stood at my elbow, and she was loading it with delicacies from the cupboard.  The contents of that cupboard!  Caviare came from it, and a small ambrosial cheese; dried figs and guava jelly; olives, cherries in brandy, wonderful filberts glazed with sugar; biscuits and all manner of queer Russian sweets.  I leant back with wide eyes.

“Feodor sends us these,” said the old woman, bringing a dish of Cornish cream and a home-made loaf to give the feast a basis.

“Who’s Feodor?”

“Feodor Himkoff.”  She paused a moment, and added, “He’s mate on a Russian vessel.”