the human bottle! She sat, with open mouth and glassy
eye, in her chair, sidling herself to and fro, with the low, peevish
sound of fretful age and bodily pain; sometimes this querulous
murmur sharpened into a shrill but unmeaning scold: "There now, you
gallows-bird! you has taken the swipes without chalking; you wants to
cheat the poor widow; but I sees you, I does! Providence protects the
aged and the innocent--Oh, oh! these twinges will be the death o' me.
Where's Martha? You jade, you! you wiperous hussy, bring the tape; does
n't you see how I suffers? Has you no bowels, to let a poor Christian
cretur perish for want o' help! That's with 'em, that's the way! No one
cares for I now,--no one has respect for the gray 'airs of the old!" And
then the voice dwindled into the whimpering "tenor of its way."

Martha, a strapping wench with red hair streaming over her "hills of
snow," was not, however, inattentive to the wants of her mistress. "Who
knows," said she to a man who sat by the hearth, drinking tea out of a
blue mug, and toasting with great care two or three huge rounds of bread
for his own private and especial nutriment,--"who knows," said she,
"what we may come to ourselves?" And, so saying, she placed a glowing
tumbler by her mistress's elbow.

But in the sunken prostration of her intellect, the old woman was
insensible even to her consolation. She sipped and drank, it is true;
but as if the stream warmed not the benumbed region through which it
passed, she continued muttering in a crazed and groaning key,--

"Is this your gratitude, you sarpent! Why does not you bring the tape,
I tells you? Am I of a age to drink water like a 'oss, you nasty thing!
Oh, to think as ever I should live to be desarted!"

Inattentive to these murmurs, which she felt unreasonable, the
bouncing Martha now quitted the room to repair to her "upper household"
avocations. The man at the hearth was the only companion left to the
widow. Gazing at her for a moment, as she sat whining, with a rude
compassion in his eye, and slowly munching his toast, which he had
now buttered and placed in a delf plate on the hob, this person thus
soothingly began:--

"Ah, Dame Lobkins, if so be as 'ow little Paul vas a vith you, it would
be a gallows comfort to you in your latter hend!"

The name of Paul made the good woman incline her bead towards the
speaker; a ray of consciousness shot through her bedulled brain.

"Little Paul,--eh, sirs! where is