arketing! If I only could describe them for Punch! I walked home
once with our porter's wife, carrying two most brilliant sticks of
rhubarb, all carmine stalk and gamboge leaf, and expressing a very
natural opinion that the rhubarb tree must be very showy to look at,
and curious to know in what kind of fruit the medicine grew.'

'Oh, Annaple! do you go yourself in that way?'

'Mark used to go with me, but, poor old fellow, he has ruinous ideas
about prices and quantities, and besides, now he is so hard worked-up
and down all day--he wants a little more of his bed in the morning.'

'And what do you want?'

'I never was a sleepy creature, and I get back in time to dress the
boy. I generally find him at high-jinks on his father's bed. It uses
up a little superfluous energy before the dressing.'

'But surely you have a servant now?'

'I've come to the conclusion that a workman's wife charing is a better
institution. No. 1, a pet of Miss Nugent's, was a nice creature, but
the London air did for her at once. No. 2, also from Micklethwayte,
instantly set up a young man, highly respectable, and ready to marry on
the spot, as they did, though their united ages don't amount to
thirty-nine. No. 3 was a Cockney, and couldn't stay because the
look-out was so dull; and No. 4 gossiped with her kind when I thought
her safe in the Temple Gardens with Billy, whereby he caught the
whooping-cough, and as she also took the liberty of wearing my fur
cloak, and was not particular as to accuracy, we parted on short
notice; and I got this woman to come in every day to scrub, help make
the bed, etc. It is much less trouble, and the only fault I have to
find with her is an absolute incapability of discerning blacks. I
believe she thinks I have a monomania against them.'

Still Annaple insisted that she did not work half so hard as her
nieces, Muriel and Janet, in their London season, and that her economy
was not nearly so trying and difficult as that which Lady Delmar had
been practising for years in order to afford them a summer there; nor
was her anxiety to make both ends meet by any means equal to her
sister's in keeping up appearances, and avoiding detrimentals. The two
sisters met occasionally, but Lady Delmar was so compassionate and
patronising that Annaple's spirit recoiled in off-hand levity and
rattle, and neither regretted the occupation that prevented them from
seeing much of one another.

A year passed by, chiefly