from the latter store so much as was necessary
for his use, but never touched the
former ; the contents of the caddy
nevertheless decreased daily, and in greater
proportion, and at last, while the Professor had
still a little left, Mrs. Brown, the bedmaker,
declared his tea to be out, and offered to get
him some more. "Well," exclaimed her
master, producing his remnant in great
triumph, "I declare, Mrs. Brown, that your
pound has not lasted so long as mine has."
But though this may have been permitted to
a great man to do, backed by the opinion of
the whole of Europe and with five hundred
bachelors within call, I affirm for myself to
have ventured on such a scheme would have
been madness. From the first designing
woman who hooked me as a lodger, to the
last, nothing of mine was safe from them ;
nothing untouched, unrummaged, unpilfered,
except a case of horse-pistols, which they
were all afraid to meddle with, and wherein
I was consequently wont to keep a few wax
matches and my biggest lumps of sugar. I
have known rash young men to inquire after
missing articles more than once, but I have
also overheard their abject apologies. If the
mistress of the house has been a small woman,
she has insisted upon their being taken
stantly up to the maid's room, in order to
examine her boxes, as such a thing never
occurred before under a roof of hers ; if a
large person, she has had the most violent
hysterics, and screamed incessantly for her
husband.

My sufferings and humiliations during the
period of my being done-for as a single
gentleman, were, indeed, of a nature too painful
to be recalled, and I will confine myself to
the relation of my experience of lodging-house
keepers since my marriage; for it is
unquestionable that in the case of these persons,
the wife is the natural protector of the
husband — the living shield which is ever
thrusting itself betwixt the spear of the
enemy, her tongue, and our saved ears; or
rather, the buffer by which the shocks of
that terrible engine are broken and weakened
before they reach ourselves. She inspires
courage, too, even in us, who have been
defeated in many conflicts, so that we descend,
upon occasion, into the very stronghold of the
foe.

We spent our honeymoon, and half our
yearly income with it, in lodgings in one of
the best streets out of Piccadilly; a very dark,
dirty, and aristocratic one, and the very
quietest retreat (said the landlady) that could
possibly have been selected for a young
couple. She took quite a motherly interest
in my little wife from the first, and, unfortunately,
a mother-in-law's in me. By excessive
apparent kindness she got my poor Ada
to leave everything in her hands, and, when I
ventured to remonstrate, I was asked, whether
I wished to see my bride consigned, through
over-work, to an early grave. At night, this
fashionable quarter was the noisiest in
London ; there seemed to be an eternal roll of
wheels from ten P.M. to four in the morning,
and our total want of rest was little compensated
for by our landlady's assurance that
there was scarcely one commoner's carriage
amongst them, and that eleven noblemen
lived opposite, all of a row. She did not mind
our going out to operas or theatres a bit, but
sat up for us herself quite cheerfully, and
finished our oyster-suppers afterwards
with-out a murmur. She never made any difficulty
about our having anything we wanted
(although she thought my wife's ordering
dinner, as a general rule, a decided interference),
and never suffered her smile to get out
of type, nor one of her false ringlets to be
ruffled, through anger, during our stay ; as a
sporting man would say, she never turned a
hair, in the way of temper ; but she did
lay it on to that extent on the butcher's and
on the baker's, and on the beer bills, that I
do believe it would have been cheaper for us
to have lived at the Clarendon. She had
the first read of our newspaper (for which we
should have paid a shilling a-week) and
charged us one shilling and sixpence for
partaking of that little enjoyment after her. She
was the completest conductor of the systems
of direct and indirect taxation possible, and
I don't believe we smuggled so much as a
biscuit, upon which, sooner or later, her duty
was not levied. She had two sleek
maid-servants without much to do and with plenty
to eat — for she did not stoop to petty economies
and was liberal enough with our provisions—
who were devoted to her interests, and
regularly trained to act under every circumstance
against the lodger. Mrs. Rubens was
the greatest brigand housekeeper I ever
met with, and infinitely superior to those
guerilla chieftains who have harassed my
life in lodgings from my youth. I think
my wife has even still a sort of sneaking
affection for her, and she shook hands with
us, on her part, with tears in her eyes, as
we drove away with diminished purse from
her aristocratic tenement. I never disputed the
bill from not knowing which exorbitant item
to make my stand upon ; but, to each of her
confederates who stood at the door with
outstretched hands and an expression such as
might have been worn by the daughters of
the horse-leech, I gave a fourpenny-piece,
neatly wrapped up in many folds of
silver-paper.

We were rather sick of London, where
beef seemed to be sixteen pence a-pound
and everything else in proportion, and
travelled northward, taking up our abode
in the lake country. The cottage that we
lodged in was the most charming in the
world, it was half smothered in roses and
honeysuckles, with diamond panes to the
casements, and a stone porch over the door.
The garden shone like a little rainbow;
so gorgeously was it decked with bud and