“I called to get some specs for a friend that’s upsighted,” she gravely informed the salesman, to his extreme amusement.  “She’s dreadful troubled, and jerks her head up like a hen a-drinkin’.  She’s got a blur a-growin’ an’ spreadin’, an’ sometimes she can see out to one side on’t, and more times she can’t.”

“Cataracts,” said a middle-aged gentleman at her side; and Betsey Lane turned to regard him with approval and curiosity.

“’Tis Miss Peggy Bond I was mentioning, of Byfleet Poor-farm,” she explained.  “I count on gettin’ some glasses to relieve her trouble, if there’s any to be found.”

“Glasses won’t do her any good,” said the stranger.  “Suppose you come and sit down on this bench, and tell me all about it.  First, where is Byfleet?” and Betsey gave the directions at length.

“I thought so,” said the surgeon.  “How old is this friend of yours?”

Betsey cleared her throat decisively, and smoothed her gown over her knees as if it were an apron; then she turned to take a good look at her new acquaintance as they sat on the rustic bench together.  “Who be you, sir, I should like to know?” she asked, in a friendly tone.

“My name’s Dunster.”

“I take it you’re a doctor,” continued Betsey, as if they had overtaken each other walking from Byfleet to South Byfleet on a summer morning.

“I’m a doctor; part of one at least,” said he.  “I know more or less about eyes; and I spend my summers down on the shore at the mouth of your river; some day I’ll come up and look at this person.  How old is she?”

“Peggy Bond is one that never tells her age; ’tain’t come quite up to where she’ll begin to brag of it, you see,” explained Betsey reluctantly; “but I know her to be nigh to seventy-six, one way or t’other.  Her an’ Mrs. Mary Ann Chick was same year’s child’n, and Peggy knows I know it, an’ two or three times when we’ve be’n in the buryin’-ground where Mary Ann lays an’ has her dates right on her headstone, I couldn’t bring Peggy to take no sort o’ notice.  I will say she makes, at times, a convenience of being upsighted.  But there, I feel for her,—­everybody does; it keeps her stubbin’ an’ trippin’ against everything, beakin’ and gazin’ up the way she has to.”

“Yes, yes,” said the doctor, whose eyes were twinkling.  “I’ll come and look after her, with your town doctor, this summer,—­some time in the last of July or first of August.”

“You’ll find occupation,” said Betsey, not without an air of patronage.  “Most of us to the Byfleet Farm has got our ails, now I tell ye.  You ain’t got no bitters that’ll take a dozen years right off an ol’ lady’s shoulders?”