head and scan my simple breakfast, before I
know what it will be myself. The mid-day
idler, lounging along Smeary Street, is often
sweetly reminded of his own luncheon by
meeting mine. Friends who knock at my
door may smell my dinner behind them,
and know how I am keeping up my stamina,
before they have had time to inquire after my
health. My supper makes the outer darkness
savoury as the evening closes in; and
my empty dishes startle the gathering silence
with convivial clatter as they wend on their
homeward way the last thing at night.
Nothing, in brief, can be much more mystifying
to the public, or more perfectly satisfactory
to myself, than the arrangements for
feeding me in the cleanest way on the most
appetising diet, which the ready kindness of
my friends has induced them to contrive.
But there is, nevertheless, one unavoidable
obstacle which mars the perfect working of
my domestic commissariat. There is one
obstinate spoke which will insert itself
disconcertingly in our otherwise smoothly-running
wheel. That spoke is (need I mention
it?)—Mrs. Glutch.

It is, I am well aware, only to be expected
that my landlady should resent the tacit
condemnation of her cleanliness and cookery
implied in the dietary arrangements which I
have made with my friends. If she would
only express her sense of offence by sulking
or flying into a passion, I should not complain;
for in the first case supposed, I might get the
better of her by noticing nothing, and, in the
second, I might hope, in course of time, to
smooth her down by soft answers and polite
prevarications. But the means she actually
takes of punishing me for my too acute sense
of the dirtiness of her kitchen, are of such a
diabolically ingenious nature, and involve
such a rapidly continuous series of small
persecutions, that I am rendered, from first to
last, quite powerless to oppose her. I know
that if I proceed to describe her plan of annoyance
I shall also return to my one prohibited
topic. But now that I have touched on it I
must positively unbosom myself on this
subject—even though by so doing I let Mrs.
Glutch force herself back into that perpetual
state of prominence from which I have been
in vain previously trying to exclude her.
The reader has witnessed my efforts to effect
my own emancipation, and knows therefore,
by experience, that if I end by passively
submitting to my landlady, my policy of
resignation has not been adopted without a
cause.

Mrs. Glutch, then, instead of visiting her
wrath on me, or my food, or my friends, or my
friends' messengers, avenges herself entirely on
their tray-cloths and dishes. She does not tear
the first nor break the second—for that would
be only a simple and primitive system of
persecution—but she smuggles them, one by one,
out of my room, and merges them inextricably
with her own property, in the grimy
regions of the kitchen. She has a power of
invisibly secreting the largest pie-dishes, and the
most voluminous cloths, under my very eyes,
which I can compare to nothing but sleight
of hand. Every morning I see table utensils,
which my friends lend me, ranged ready to
go back, in my own room. Every evening,
when they are wanted, I find that some of
them are missing, and that my landlady is
even more surprised by that circumstance
than I am myself. If my friends' servant
ventures to say, in, her presence, that the
cook wants her yesterday's tray-cloth, and if
I refer him to Mrs. Glutch, the immoveable
woman only sniffs, tosses her head, and
"wonders how the young man can have
demeaned himself by bringing her such a
peremptory message." If I try on my own sole
responsibility to recover the missing property,
she lets me see, by her manner at the outset,
that she thinks I suspect her of stealing it.
If I take no notice of this manoeuvre, and
innocently persist in asking additional
questions about the missing article, the
following is a sample of the kind of dialogue
that is sure to pass between us:—

"I think, Mrs. Glutch"—

"Yes, sir!"

"I think one of my friends' large pudding-basins
has gone down-stairs."

" Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin?
No: I think not."

"But I can't find it up here, and it is
wanted back."

"Naturally, sir."

"I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch,
ready to go back, last night."

"Did you, indeed, sir ? "

"Perhaps the servant took it down-stairs to
clean it ? "

"Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to
remember, you told her last Monday evening
—or, no, I beg pardon—last Tuesday morning
that your friends cleaned up their own
dishes, and that their things was not to be
touched."

"Perhaps you took it down-stairs then yourself,
Mrs. Glutch, by mistake?"

"I sir! I didn't. I couldn't. Why should
I? I think you said a large pudding-basin,
sir?"

"Yes, I did say so."

"I have ten large pudding-basins of my
own, sir."

"I am very glad to hear it. Will you be
so good as to look among them, and see if
my friends' basin has not got mixed up with
your crockery ? "

Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face,
slowly scratches her muscular arms, as if she
felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them,
looks at me steadily with a pair of glaring
eyes, and leaves the room at the slowest
possible pace. I wait and ring—wait and
ring—wait and ring. After the third waiting
and the third ringing, she reappears, redder
of face and slower of march than before, with