remuneration in the form of salary, varying
from forty to four thousand pounds per annum,
and paid every quarter out of the Civil List
portion of the taxes. He looks over that
same Civil List, and finds that, although he is
its head and centre, he receives for his own
disposal less than one-sixth every year, the
rest being absorbed before it reaches him by
the surrounding circles. Indignantly he
rings a bell, and is answered, like Lord
Bafeman, by a proud young porter, page,
equerry, groom, waiter, and K.C.B. The
bewildered monarch, considerably awed, asks
for a glass of water. Four and twenty
bells ring in succession, each one summoning
another, until at last the man is reached,
whose duty it is to draw the water, after the
Asiatic system of caste in full working order,
aided by all the advantages of a superior
civilisation. The water—with some considerable
delay—is passed on from hand to hand, until
it reaches the expectant and bewildered
monarch. He sees the whole organisation
at a glance—the perfect, unbroken chain
of relative flunkeyism: everybody combing
everybody else's hair, everybody brushing
everybody else's coat, everybody pouring out
everybody else's coffee, everybody handing
everybody else a shoe-horn, everybody
attending everybody else abroad, everybody
waiting upon everybody else at dinner,
everybody laughing at everybody else's
jokes, and sometimes (for quarrels will arise in
the very best-regulated palaces), everybody
kicking everybody else down-stairs.

Finally, we can imagine our bewildered
monarch so much alarmed at the amount of
detail that exists for him to master, and at
the number and variety of individualisms of
different degrees of importance he has to avoid
offending and misdirecting, that, in the dusk
of evening he seizes a stout pea-jacket, and
slips privately out at a back-gate, to take a
long and quiet cruise in the Baltic or the
Mediterranean.

MY LADY LUDLOW.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.

As far as I can remember, it was very soon
after this that I first began to have the pain
in my hip, which has ended in making me a
cripple for life. I hardly recollect more than
one walk after our return under Mr. Gray's
escort from Mr. Lathom's. Indeed, at the
time, I was not without suspicions (which I
never named) that the beginning of all the
mischief was a great jump I had taken from
the top of one of the styles on that very
occasion.

Well, it is a long while ago, and God
disposes of us all, and I am not going to tire
you out with telling you how I thought and
felt, and how, when I saw what my life was
to be, I could hardly bring myself to be
patient, but rather wished to die at once.
You can everyone of you think for yourselves
what becoming all at once useless and unable
to move, and by-and-by growing hopeless of
cure, and feeling that one must be a burden
to some one all one's life long, would be to
an active, wilful, strong girl of seventeen,
anxious to get on in the world, so as, if
possible, to help her brothers and sisters. So I
shall only say, that one among the blessings
which arose out of what seemed at the time
a great, black sorrow was, that Lady Ludlow
for many years took me, as it were, into her
own especial charge; and now, as I lie still
and alone in my old age, it is such a
pleasure to think of her.

Mrs. Medlicott was great as a nurse, and
I am sure I can never be grateful enough to
her memory for all her kindness. But she
was puzzled to know how to manage me in
other ways. I used to have long, hard fits
of crying; and, thinking that I ought to go
home—and yet what could they do with me
there?—and a hundred and fifty other anxious
thoughts, some of which I could tell to Mrs.
Medlicott, and others I could not. Her way
of comforting me was hurrying away for some
kind of tempting or strengthening food—a
basin of melted calves'-foot jelly was, I am
sure she thought, a cure for every woe.

"There! take it, dear, take it!" she
would say; "and don't go on fretting for
what can't be helped."

But I think she got puzzled at length at
the non-efficacy of good things to eat; and
one day, after I had limped down to see the
doctor, in Mrs. Medlicott's sitting room—a
room lined with cupboards, containing
preserves and dainties of all kinds, which she
perpetually made, and never touched herself
—when I was returning to my bedroom to
cry away the afternoon, under pretence of
arranging my clothes, John Footman brought
me a message from my lady (with whom the
doctor had been having a conversation) to
bid me go to her in that private sitting-room
at the end of the suite of apartments, about
which I spoke in describing the day of my
first arrival at Hanbury. I had hardly been
in it since; as, when we read to my lady, she
generally sate in the small withdrawing-room
out of which this private room of hers opened.
I suppose great people do not require what
we smaller people value so much,—I mean
privacy. I do not think that there was a
room which my lady occupied that had not
two doors, and some of them had three or
four. Then my lady had always Adams
waiting upon her in her bed-chamber; and
it was Mrs. Medlicott's duty to sit within
call as it were, in a sort of ante-room that
led out of my lady's own sitting-room, on
the opposite side to the drawing-room door.
To fancy the house, you must take a great
square, and halve it by a line; at one end of
this line was the hall-door, or public entrance;
at the opposite the private entrance from a
terrace, which was terminated at one end by
a sort of postern door in an old grey-stone