“ ‘Little old woman, and whither so high?’

‘To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.’

“ ‘Little old woman, and whither so high?’ ‘To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.’

“You will sweep them so neatly out of our sky in the course of your housekeeping, Esther, that one of these days we shall have to abandon the growlery and nail up the door.”

This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort that my own name soon became quite lost among them.