eye of a sick man. With equal candour
I must now record of my in-door life in
London, that it was passed with many other
lodgers, in a large house without a vestige
of toy-shop prettiness in any part of it. I
must acknowledge that I looked out upon drab-
coloured houses and serious faces through a
smoke-laden atmosphere; and I must admit
that I was waited on (so far as the actual
house-service was concerned) by people whose
cloudy countenances seemed unconscious of a
gleam of inner sunshine for days and days
together. Nor did the contrast end here.
In my lodgings at Paris, I have represented
myself as having about me a variety of
animate and inanimate objects which I might
notice or not just as I pleased, and as using
my freedom of choice in a curiously partial
and restricted manner, in consequence of the
narrowing effect of my illness on my
sympathies and powers of observation. In my
London lodging, I enjoyed no such liberty.
I could not get even a temporary freedom
of selection, except by fighting for it
resolutely at odds and ends of time. I had
but one object which offered itself to
my observation, which perpetually presented
itself, which insisted on being noticed, no
matter how mentally unfit and morally
unwilling my illness rendered me to observe
it; and that object was—my landlady, Mrs.
Glutch.

Behold me then, now, no longer a free
agent; no longer a fanciful invalid with
caprices to confide to the ear of the patient
reader. My health is no better in Smeary
Street than it was in the Champs Elysées; I
take as much medicine in London as I took
in Paris; but my character is altered in spite
of myself, and the form and colour of my
present fragment of writing will, I fear, but
too surely reflect the change. I was a sick
man with several things to discourse of—I
am a sick man with only one topic to talk
about. I may escape from it for a few
sentences at a time, in these pages, as I escaped
from it for a few minutes at a time in Smeary
Street; but the burden of my song will be
now, what the burden of my life has been
lately—my landlady. I am going to begin
with her—I shall go on with her—I shall
try to wander away from her—I shall get
back to her—I shall end with her. She
will mix herself up with everything I have
to say; will intrude on my observations out
of window; will get into my victuals and
drink, and drops, and draughts, and pills;
will come between me and my studies of
character among maids-of-all-work, in this
too faithful narrative, just as she did in the
real scenes which it endeavours to represent.
While I make this acknowledgment as a
proper warning to the reader that I have changed
into a monotonous sick man since we met last,
let me add, in justice to myself, that my one
subject has at least the advantage of being a
terrible one. Think of a sick fly waited on by
a healthy blue-bottle, and you will have a
fair idea of the relative proportions and
positions of myself and Mrs. Glutch.

I have hardly been settled an hour, in my
second-floor front room before the conviction
is forced on my mind that Mrs. Glutch is
resolved to make a conquest of me—of the
maternal, or platonic kind, let me hasten to
add, so as to stop the mouth of scandal before
it is well opened. I find that she presents
herself before me in the character of a woman
suffused in a gentle melancholy, proceeding
from perpetual sympathy for my suffering
condition. It is part of my character, as a
sick man, that I know by instinct when
people really pity me, just as children and
dogs know when people really like them;
and I have, consequently, not been five
minutes in Mrs. Glutch's society, before I
know that her sympathy for me is entirely
of that sort of which a lai'ge assortment is
always on hand, and all orders for which,
when Self-interest is the customer, can be
invariably executed with promptitude and
despatch. I take no pains tp conceal from
Mrs. Glutch that I have found her out; but
she is too innocent to understand me, and
goes on sympathising in the very face of
detection. She becomes, in spite of her knobbed
face, knotty arms, and great stature and
strength, languidly sentimental in manner,
the moment she enters my room. Language
runs out of her in a perpetual flow, and
politeness encircles her as with a halo that
can never be dimmed. " I have been so
anxious about you! " is her first morning's
salutation to me. The words are preceded
by a faint cough, and followed by an
expressively weary sigh, as if she had passed a
sleepless night on my account. The next
morning she appears with a bunch of
wallflowers in her mighty fist, and with another
faint prefatory cough, " I beg pardon, sir;
but I have brought you a few flowers. I
think they relieve the mind." The expressively
weary sigh follows again, as if it would
suggest this time that she has toiled into the
country to gather me the flowers at early
dawn. I do not find, strange as it may seem,
that they relieve my mind at all; but of
course I say, " Thank you."—" Thank you,
sir," rejoins Mrs. Glutch—for it is part of this
woman's system of oppressive politeness
always to thank me for thanking her. She
invariably contrives to have the last word,
no matter in what circumstances the
courteous contention, which is the main
characteristic of our daily intercourse, may take
its rise. Say that she comes into my room
and gets into my way (which she always
does) at the very time when she ought to be
out of it - her first words are necessarily, " I
beg pardon." I growl (not so brutally as I
could wish, being weak,) " Never mind! "—
" Thank you, sir," says Mrs. Glutch, and
coughs faintly, and sighs, and delays going
out as long as possible. Or, take another