tay for the day at least, and that the gas bill for the quarter was
going to beat the record in high-jumping. She also knew that this was
because she had allowed her new gentleman lodger, Mr. Arthur Constant,
to pay a fixed sum of a shilling a week for gas, instead of charging him
a proportion of the actual account for the whole house. The
meteorologists might have saved the credit of their science if they had
reckoned with Mrs. Drabdump's next gas bill when they predicted the
weather and made "Snow" the favorite, and said that "Fog" would be
nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs. Drabdump took no credit to herself
for her prescience. Mrs. Drabdump indeed took no credit for anything,
paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life like a
wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon. That things always went as
badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her in the least.

Mrs. Drabdump was a widow. Widows are not born, but made, else you might
have fancied Mrs. Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature had given her
that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated, hard-eyed
visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always associated
with widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that women can
lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr. Drabdump had
scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs. Drabdump's
foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling
day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it
vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of
scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from overwork among the poor that Death has
been reduced to a shadow.

Mrs. Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very
scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of
flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark.
Science was a success as usual; and Mrs. Drabdump rose from her knees
content, like a Parsee priestess who had duly paid her morning devotions
to her deity. Then she started violently, and nearly lost her balance.
Her eye had caught the hands of the clock on the mantel. They pointed to
fifteen minutes to seven. Mrs. Drabdump's devotion to the kitchen fire
invariably terminated at fifteen minutes past six. What was the matter
with the clock?

Mrs. Drabdump had an immediate vision of Snoppet, the neighboring
horologist, keeping the clock in hand for