e bill of my brief residence beneath her roof was quite
three feet in length, each of the following items being set down every
twenty-four hours:--

Apartments.
Ale.
Bath.
Kidney beans.
Candles.
Vegetable marrow.
Tea.
Eggs.
Butter.
Bread.
Cut off joint.
Plums.
Potatoes.
Chops.
Kipper.
Rasher.
Salt.
Pepper.
Vinegar.
Sugar.
Washing towels.
Lights.
Kitchen fire.
Sitting-room fire.
Attendance.
Boots.

The total was seventeen shillings and sixpence, and as Mrs. Hobbs wrote
upon it, in her neat English hand, 'Received payment, with respectful
thanks,' she carefully blotted the wet ink, and remarked casually that
service was not included in 'attendance,' but that she would leave the
amount to me.

Chapter XVIII. I meet Mrs. Bobby.

Mrs. Bobby and I were born for each other, though we have been a long
time in coming together. She is the pink of neatness and cheeriness, and
she has a broad, comfortable bosom on which one might lay a motherless
head, if one felt lonely in a stranger land. I never look at her without
remembering what the poet Samuel Rogers said of Lady Parke: 'She is so
good that when she goes to heaven she will find no difference save that
her ankles will be thinner and her head better dressed.'

No raw fowls visit my bedside here; food comes as I wish it to come when
I am painting, like manna from heaven. Mrs. Bobby brings me three times
a day something to eat, and though it is always whatever she likes, I
always agree in her choice, and send the blue dishes away empty. She
asked me this morning if I enjoyed my 'h'egg,' and remarked that she had
only one fowl, but it laid an egg for me every morning, so I might know
it was 'fresh as fresh.' It is certainly convenient: the fowl lays the
egg from seven to seven-thirty, I eat it from eight to eight-thirty; no
haste, no waste. Never before have I seen such heavenly harmony between
supply and demand. Never before have I been in such visible and unbroken
connection with the source of my food. If I should ever desire two eggs,
or if the fowl should turn sulky or indolent, I suppose Mrs. Bobby would
have to go half a mile to the nearest shop, but as yet everything has
worked to a charm. The cow is milked into my pitcher in the morning, and
the fowl lays her egg almost literally in my egg-cup. One of the little