understanding that though we had the right
to leave at a week's notice, it was our wish
to remain for at least a year or two. Then I
went down to Suffolk and fetched Arabella
Mannacrop. We had a short honeymoon,
and came to our new lodgings with a coach-
load of enormous boxes, Arabella's goods
and chattels. Uncles, aunts, friends and
cousins poured in packages of presents. We
set up a piano. Surrounded with articles
that would not endure to be cracked, crushed
or crumpled, things that it would take a
fortnight to pack up safely and a week to
unpack, was it likely that we should ever
move, if we could help it? In consideration
of other advantages, I had lowered my
standard somewhat in the battle for
cleanliness on entering those lodgings. The noise
of the great thoroughfare we became used
to, and Mrs. Batkinson freely consented to
be kept awake every Sunday night by the
sheep and cattle on their way to Smithfield.
Such matters were a portion of our
bargain.

As the warm weather came it appeared
that there were reasons why the inside of the
house should be insupportably close and
unwholesome. Mrs. Batkinson began to lose
her Suffolk roses from her cheeks; but she
said, "This is London, I must expect to feel a
change;" and so for all that we never thought
of moving. As the warm weather became
more decided, Mrs. Batkinson beheld one
night a stout negro of the flat-back tribe—
known among comic writers as B flats—
stealing up towards the head of the bed. Her
presence of mind did not forsake her, and she
killed him. Another followed to avenge his
death. They came by twos and threes, and
then they came by tribes. In, under, over
and about the bed, in the cupboards, hidden
like Posthumus in boxes, behind curtains and
in every corner, negroes lay in wait to have
our blood. Mrs. Batkinson had such a load
of boxes on her mind that, although dreadfully
alarmed, she preferred that we should
fight the enemy while any hope of victory
remained with us. A savage war ensued, in
which there was no quarter given on either
side; but in spite of the most active efforts
that we could make as lodgers, feebly backed
by the alliance of our landlord and landlady,
the negroes brought so many reinforcements
into the field, and so hemmed us in with
their armies, that before they had got through
their summer campaign, we were compelled
to beat a precipitate retreat.

Impeded much with baggage, and a little
faint for want of wholesome air, we took
refuge in the airiest place we could find, high
up the stairs of a high house in a high part
of St. John's Wood, with a view over to the
hills and far away. Cleanliness had again
determined our choice of an abode. My
nephew I had by that time apprenticed to a
jeweller, and for myself and wife only two
rooms sufficed. Economy was necessary to
us, and for our pair of rooms we had agreed
to pay a pound a week. The rooms when we
engaged them were empty; but, like the
whole house, they were very clean. Mrs.
Batkinson, in the Suffolk-like simplicity of
her young heart, was drawn towards the
landlady, a pure lodging-house keeper, who
had grown ominously stout upon her calling.
We saw the rooms without the furniture, but
we were promised all that was desirable. So
we went in. The obvious characteristic of
those apartments when we took up our abode
in them was, that they were very delightful
out of window. In themselves they were of
low pitch, and dismal. The parlour was a
dogged radical thing that shouted out from
every wall, and every white cupboard-door,
and down from the low ceiling upon any
visitors who entered, "Don't let me deceive
you, I am not a parlour. I'm a perverted
and misused front bedroom."  Very clumsily
it was perverted, with no other furniture
allowed to it by the landlady than a carpet,
two shakey old tables, six bedroom chairs,
and one old mahogany arm-chair seated with
horsehair. Mrs. Batkinson's piano, and work-
table and gimcrackery, could make nothing of
the room. It was clean, as a den may be
clean, and that was all; but if you went to
the window and looked out of doors, then to
be sure the lodgings were delightful.

We had a bedroom curtain improvised for
us by Mrs. Vamper with an old napkin, and
other furniture on the same scale of liberality,
but we did not mind. We said to ourselves,
"Perhaps she cannot afford more. We will
pay her regularly, and be civil to her and
considerate; then she will do her duty by us.''
Would she, though?

Mrs. Vamper, who was a widow, knew
where her duty was due, and devoted,
apparently, her whole energy to operations upon
an elderly single gentleman, who was said to
be a corn and coal merchant, on the ground-
floor. She poured out for him his early
breakfast with her own fat hands, and
tempted his appetite thereat with pigeon pies
of her own making. Towards all other
lodgers her disposition proved to be fierce.
She tyrannised openly; she never said or did
anything subservient; never mounted a stair
for anybody, even when she had lodgers on
every floor. As we came in the drawing-
room lodgers were departing through a
whirlwind of dispute, of which we heard more
than we liked. Mrs. Vamper came and sat
down on our chairs, whether we chose or
not, to talk to us about them. After that
the drawing-rooms were left empty, and
Mrs. Vamper, for some months, would not
condescend to offer them to be let. She lived
exclusively by lodgers, and she hated the whole
race.

Poor Mrs. Batkinson went trembling
downstairs to make her pies; and, at dinner-time,
fretted, as only a good housewife frets, at the
fierce and vindictive way in which the meat