; and your fear is, that Alecto, Tisiphone,
or Megaera, will come flying into the parlour with a bloody cleaver,
dripping with the butler's brains. During the time of the quarrel the
spit has been standing still, and a gigot of the five-year-old
black-face burnt on one side to a cinder.--"To dinner with what appetite
you may."

It would be quite unpardonable to forget one especial smell which
irretrievably ruined our happiness during a whole summer--the smell of
a dead rat. The accursed vermin died somewhere in the Cottage; but
whether beneath a floor, within lath and plaster, or in roof, baffled
the conjectures of the most sagacious. The whole family used to walk
about the Cottage for hours every day, snuffing on a travel of
discovery; and we distinctly remember the face of one elderly
maiden-lady at the moment she thought she had traced the source of the
fumee to the wall behind a window-shutter. But even at the very same
instant we ourselves had proclaimed it with open nostril from a press in
an opposite corner. Terriers were procured--but the dog Billy himself
would have been at fault. To pull down the whole Cottage would have been
difficult--at least to build it up again would have been so; so we had
to submit. Custom, they say, is second nature, but not when a dead rat
is in the house. No, none can ever become accustomed to that; yet good
springs out of evil--for the live rats could not endure it, and
emigrated to a friend's house, about a mile off, who has never had a
sound night's rest from that day. We have not revisited our Cottage for
several years; but time does wonders, and we were lately told by a
person of some veracity that the smell was then nearly gone; but our
informant is a gentleman of blunted olfactory nerves, having been
engaged from seventeen to seventy in a soap-work.

Smoke too. More especially that mysterious and infernal sort, called
back-smoke! The old proverb, "No smoke without fire," is a base lie. We
have seen smoke without fire in every room in a most delightful Cottage
we inhabited during the dog-days. The moment you rushed for refuge even
into a closet, you were blinded and stifled; nor shall we ever forget
our horror on being within an ace of smotheration in the cellar. At
last, we groped our way into the kitchen. Neither cook nor jack was
visible. We heard, indeed, a whirring and revolving noise--and then
suddenly Girzie swearing through the mist. Yet all this while people
were adm