rass. 'I suspect if I asked
any questions on that head, our alliance would be at an end. I wonder
whether she is a dragon by-the-bye, or something in the mermaid way.
She has rather a scaly appearance. But mermaids are fond of looking at
themselves in the glass, which she can't be. And they have a habit of
combing their hair, which she hasn't. No, she's a dragon.'

'Where are you going, old fellow?' said Dick aloud, as Miss Sally wiped
her pen as usual on the green dress, and uprose from her seat.

'To dinner,' answered the dragon.

'To dinner!' thought Dick, 'that's another circumstance. I don't
believe that small servant ever has anything to eat.'

'Sammy won't be home,' said Miss Brass. 'Stop till I come back. I
sha'n't be long.'

Dick nodded, and followed Miss Brass--with his eyes to the door, and
with his ears to a little back parlour, where she and her brother took
their meals.

'Now,' said Dick, walking up and down with his hands in his pockets,
'I'd give something--if I had it--to know how they use that child, and
where they keep her. My mother must have been a very inquisitive
woman; I have no doubt I'm marked with a note of interrogation
somewhere. My feelings I smother, but thou hast been the cause of this
anguish, my--upon my word,' said Mr Swiveller, checking himself and
falling thoughtfully into the client's chair, 'I should like to know
how they use her!'

After running on, in this way, for some time, Mr Swiveller softly
opened the office door, with the intention of darting across the street
for a glass of the mild porter. At that moment he caught a parting
glimpse of the brown head-dress of Miss Brass flitting down the kitchen
stairs. 'And by Jove!' thought Dick, 'she's going to feed the small
servant. Now or never!'

First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to
disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived at
the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass had entered the
same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a very dark
miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls disfigured by a
thousand rents and blotches. The water was trickling out of a leaky
butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly
eagerness of starvation. The grate, which was a wide one, was wound
and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a little thin sandwich
of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar,