the missing article of property held out before
her at arm's length.

"I beg pardon, sir," she says, "but is this
anything like your friends' large pudding-
basin?"

"That is the basin itself, Mrs. Glutch."

" Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem
so positive, it isn't for me to contradict
you. But I hope I shall give no offence
if I mention that I had ten large pudding-
basins of my own, and that I miss one of them."

With that last dexterous turn of speech,
she gives up the basin with the air of a high-
minded woman, who will resign her own
property, rather than expose herself to the
injurious doubts of a morbidly suspicious
man. When I add that the little scene just
described takes place between us nearly every
day, the reader will admit that, although Mrs.
Glutch cannot prevent me from enjoying on
her dirty premises the contraband luxury
a clean dinner, she can at least go great
lengths towards accomplishing the secondary
annoyance of preventing me from comfortably
digesting it.

I have hinted at a third personage in the
shape of a servant in my report of the foregoing
dialogue; and I have previously alluded
to myself (in paving the way for the introduction
of my landlady), as extending my studies
of human character, in my London lodging,
to those forlorn members of the population
called maids-of-all-work. The maids—I use
the plural number advisedly—present
themselves to me to be studied as apprentices to
the hard business of service, under the
matronly superintendence of Mrs. Glutch.
The succession of them is brisk enough to
keep all the attention I can withdraw from
my landlady constantly employed in investigating
their peculiarities. By the time I
have been three weeks in Smeary Street, I
have had three maids-of-all-work. to study—a
new servant for each week! In very different
ways, the three attract my attention, by
showing me that the spectacle of my illness
makes a decided impression on them. They
are not sentimentally affected by it; they do
not exhibit the sweet compassion of my
Parisian portress—but still they ARE
impressed, and that one fact gives them a claim
to attention in my estimation. In reviewing
the three individually before the reader, I
must be allowed to distinguish them by
numbers instead of names. Mrs. Glutch screams
at them all indiscriminately by the name of
Mary, just as she would scream at a succession
of cats by the name of Puss. Now, although
I am always writing about Mrs. Glutch, I
have still spirit enough left to vindicate my
own individuality, by abstaining from following
her example. In obedience, therefore, to
these last relics of independent sentiment,
permit me the freedom of numbering my
maids-of-all-work, as I introduce them to
public notice in these pages.

Number One is amazed by the spectacle of
my illness, and always stares at me. If I fell
ill one evening, went to a dispensary, asked
for a bottle of physic, and got well on it the
next morning; or, if I presented myself
before her at the last gasp, and died forthwith
in Smeary Street, she would, in either case, be
able to understand me. But an illness on
which medicine produces no immediate effect,
and which does not keep the patient always
groaning in bed, is beyond her comprehension.
Personally, she is very short and sturdy, and
is always covered from head to foot with
powdered black, which seems to lie especially
thick on her in the morning. How does she
accumulate it? Does she wash herself with
the ordinary liquid used for common-place
ablutions; or does she take a plunge-bath
every morning under the kitchen grate? I
am afraid to ask this question of her; but I
contrive to make her talc to me about other
of things. She looks very much surprised, poor
creature, when I first let her see that I have
other words to utter in addressing her,
besides the word of command; and seems to
think me the most eccentric of mankind,
when she finds that I have a decent anxiety
to spare her all useless trouble in waiting on
me. Young as she is, she has drudged so
long over the wickedest ways of this world,
without one leisure moment to look up from
the everlasting dirt on the road at the green
landscape around, and the pure sky above,
that she has become hardened to the saddest,
surely, of human lots before she is yet a
woman grown. Life means dirty work,
small wages, hard words, no holidays, no
social station, no future, according to her
experience of it. No human being ever was
created for this. No state of society which
composedly accepts this, in the cases of
thousands, as one of the necessary conditions
of its seltish comforts, can pass itself off as
civilised, except under the most audacious of
all false pretences. These thoughts rise in
me often, when I ring the bell, and the
maid-of-all-work answers it wearily. I cannot
communicate them to her: I can only do my
best to encourage her to peep over the cruel
social barrier which separates her unmerited
comfortlessness from my undeserved luxury,
and encourage her to talk to me now and then
on something like equal terms. I am just
succeeding in the attainment of this object, when
Number One scatters all my plans and
purposes to the winds, by telling me that she is
going away. I ask Why? and am told that
she cannot bear being railed at and a-hunted
about by Mrs. Glutch any longer. The
oppressively polite woman who cannot address
me without begging my pardon, can find no
hard words in the vocabulary hard enough
for the maid-of-all-work. " I am frightened
of my life," says Number One, apologising to
me for leaving the place. " I am so little and
she's so big. She heaves things at my head,
she does. Work as hard as you may, you