Saki

“ Jim, as every one called him, who divided his time between amateur horse-dealing, rabbit-shooting, and flirting with the farm maids.
“I’m afraid old Martha is dying,” said Emma. Jim was not the sort of person to whom one had to break news gently.
“Nonsense,” he said; “Martha means to live to a hundred. She told me so, and she’ll do it.”
“She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may just be the beginning of the break-up,” persisted Emma, with a feeling of contempt for the slowness and dulness of the young man. ”

“ Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf old ears could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have met with short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region spread over the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of the household. Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at her finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly fourscore years – all leg and no breast. ”

“ If there were something in these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last good-bye word to in that old kitchen. ”