d a
barefoot girl, with long black hair flowing over her face, which she
thrust in at the door.

"Let them sup in the nursery, Elizabeth, and send--ah! Edwards to me."

"Is it cook you mane, ma'am?" said the girl.

"Send her at once!" shrieked the unfortunate woman; and the noise of
frying presently ceasing, a hot woman made her appearance, wiping her
brows with her apron, and asking, with an accent decidedly Hibernian,
what the misthress wanted.

"Lead me up to my dressing-room, Edwards: I really am not fit to be seen
in this dishabille by Mr. Fitz-Boodle."

"Fait' I can't!" says Edwards; "sure the masther's at the butcher's, and
can't look to the kitchen-fire!"

"Nonsense, I must go!" cried Mrs. Haggarty; and Edwards, putting on a
resigned air, and giving her arm and face a further rub with her apron,
held out her arm to Mrs. Dennis, and the pair went upstairs.

She left me to indulge my reflections for half-an-hour, at the end of
which period she came downstairs dressed in an old yellow satin, with
the poor shoulders exposed just as much as ever. She had mounted a
tawdry cap, which Haggarty himself must have selected for her. She had
all sorts of necklaces, bracelets, and earrings in gold, in garnets,
in mother-of-pearl, in ormolu. She brought in a furious savour of musk,
which drove the odours of onions and turf-smoke before it; and she
waved across her wretched angular mean scarred features an old cambric
handkerchief with a yellow lace-border.

"And so you would have known me anywhere, Mr. Fitz-Boodle?" said she,
with a grin that was meant to be most fascinating. "I was sure you
would; for though my dreadful illness deprived me of my sight, it is a
mercy that it did not change my features or complexion at all!"

This mortification had been spared the unhappy woman; but I don't
know whether, with all her vanity, her infernal pride, folly, and
selfishness, it was charitable to leave her in her error.

Yet why correct her? There is a quality in certain people which is
above all advice, exposure, or correction. Only let a man or woman have
DULNESS sufficient, and they need bow to no extant authority. A dullard
recognises no betters; a dullard can't see that he is in the wrong;
a dullard has no scruples of conscience, no doubts of pleasing, or
succeeding, or doing right; no qualms for other people's feelings, no
respect but for the fool himself. How can you make a fool perceive he is
a fool? Such a personag