now. Thy ugly, cunning, pitted face,
twitching and grinning; thy small, sightless orbs rolling in thy devil's
merriment, and thy shining forehead red with punch.

In the kitchen things were not more orderly; M. M.'s lean maid was making
merry with the bailiff, and a fat and dreadful trollop with one
eye--tipsy, noisy, and pugnacious.

Poor little Sally Nutter and her maids kept dismal vigil in her
bed-room. But that her neighbours and her lawyer would in no sort permit
it, the truth is, the frightened little soul would long ago have made
herself wings, and flown anywhere for peace and safety.

It is remarkable how long one good topic, though all that may be said
upon it has been said many scores of times, will serve the colloquial
purposes of the good folk of the kitchen or the nursery. There was
scarcely half-an-hour in the day during which the honest maids and their
worthy little mistress did not discuss the dreadful Mary Matchwell. They
were one and all, though in different degrees, indescribably afraid of
her. Her necromantic pretensions gave an indistinctness and poignancy to
their horror. She seemed to know, by a diabolical intuition, what
everybody was about--she was so noiseless and stealthy, and always at
your elbow when you least expected. Those large dismal eyes of hers,
they said, glared green in the dark like a cat's; her voice was
sometimes so coarse and deep, and her strength so unnatural, that they
were often on the point of believing her to be a man in disguise. She
was such a blasphemer, too; and could drink what would lay a trooper
under the table, and yet show it in nothing but the superintensity of
her Satanic propensities. She was so malignant, and seemed to bear to
all God's creatures so general a malevolence, that her consistent and
superlative wickedness cowed and paralysed them. The enigma grew more
horrible every day and night, and they felt, or fancied, a sort of
influence stealing over them which benumbed their faculty of resistance,
and altogether unstrung their nerves.

The grand compotation going on in the parlour waxed louder and wilder as
the night wore on. There were unseen guests there, elate and inspiring,
who sat with the revellers--phantoms who attend such wassail, and keep
the ladle of the punch-bowl clinking, the tongue of the songster glib
and tuneful, and the general mirth alive and furious. A few honest folk,
with the gift of a second sight in such matters, discover their u