the candle-box,
the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing
that a beetle could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect
of the place would have killed a chameleon. He would have known, at
the first mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given
up the ghost in despair.

The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and
hung her head.

'Are you there?' said Miss Sally.

'Yes, ma'am,' was the answer in a weak voice.

'Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it, I
know,' said Miss Sally.

The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her
pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold
potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the
small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up
a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the
carving-fork.

'Do you see this?' said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square inches
of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out on the
point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, 'yes.'

'Then don't you ever go and say,' retorted Miss Sally, 'that you hadn't
meat here. There, eat it up.'

This was soon done. 'Now, do you want any more?' said Miss Sally.

The hungry creature answered with a faint 'No.' They were evidently
going through an established form.

'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up the
facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want
any more, and you answer, 'no!' Then don't you ever go and say you were
allowanced, mind that.'

With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away and locked the safe, and
then drawing near to the small servant, overlooked her while she
finished the potatoes.

It was plain that some extraordinary grudge was working in Miss Brass's
gentle breast, and that it was that which impelled her, without the
smallest present cause, to rap the child with the blade of the knife,
now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her back, as if she found
it quite impossible to stand so close to her without administering a
few slight knocks. But Mr Swiveller was not a little surprised to see
his fellow-clerk, after walking slowly backwards towards the door, as
if she were trying to withdraw herself from the