ow-cases had
been ruthlessly smashed. A courageous servant in No. 4 had seen a masked
burglar, on his hands and knees, attempting to enter their scuttle; but,
on her shouting, "Away wid yees!" he instantly fled.

I sat through this recital with cheeks that burned uncomfortably; nor
was I the less embarrassed, on raising my eyes, to meet Mrs. Brown's
fixed curiously and mischievously on mine. As soon as I could make my
escape from the table, I did so, and, running rapidly up stairs, sought
refuge from any possible inquiry in my own room. Baby was still asleep
in the corner. It would not be safe to remove him until the lodgers had
gone down town; and I was revolving in my mind the expediency of keeping
him until night veiled his obtrusive eccentricity from the public eye,
when there came a cautious tap at my door. I opened it. Mrs. Brown
slipped in quietly, closed the door softly, stood with her back against
it, and her hand on the knob, and beckoned me mysteriously towards her.
Then she asked in a low voice,--

"Is hair-dye poisonous?"

I was too confounded to speak.

"Oh, do! you know what I mean," she said impatiently. "This stuff." She
produced suddenly from behind her a bottle with a Greek label so long
as to run two or three times spirally around it from top to bottom. "He
says it isn't a dye: it's a vegetable preparation, for invigorating"--

"Who says?" I asked despairingly.

"Why, Mr. Parker, of course!" said Mrs. Brown severely, with the air of
having repeated the name a great many times,--"the old gentleman in the
room above. The simple question I want to ask," she continued with the
calm manner of one who has just convicted another of gross ambiguity of
language, "is only this: If some of this stuff were put in a saucer, and
left carelessly on the table, and a child, or a baby, or a cat, or any
young animal, should come in at the window, and drink it up,--a whole
saucer full,--because it had a sweet taste, would it be likely to hurt
them?"

I cast an anxious glance at Baby, sleeping peacefully in the corner, and
a very grateful one at Mrs. Brown, and said I didn't think it would.

"Because," said Mrs. Brown loftily as she opened the door, "I thought,
if it was poisonous, remedies might be used in time. Because," she added
suddenly, abandoning her lofty manner, and wildly rushing to the corner
with a frantic embrace of the unconscious Baby, "because, if any nasty
stuff should turn its booful hair a hor