e nearly doubled themselves. Through sheer inability
to spend his income he has been obliged to hoard in self-defence. He
still lives in the Temple in the same rooms I took for him when he gave
up his shop, for no one has been able to induce him to take a house. His
house, he says, is wherever there is a good hotel. When he is in town he
likes to work and to be quiet. When out of town he feels that he has
left little behind him that can go wrong, and he would not like to be
tied to a single locality. "I know no exception," he says, "to the rule
that it is cheaper to buy milk than to keep a cow."

As I have mentioned Mrs Jupp, I may as well say here the little that
remains to be said about her. She is a very old woman now, but no one
now living, as she says triumphantly, can say how old, for the woman in
the Old Kent Road is dead, and presumably has carried her secret to the
grave. Old, however, though she is, she lives in the same house, and
finds it hard work to make the two ends meet, but I do not know that she
minds this very much, and it has prevented her from getting more to drink
than would be good for her. It is no use trying to do anything for her
beyond paying her allowance weekly, and absolutely refusing to let her
anticipate it. She pawns her flat iron every Saturday for 4d., and takes
it out every Monday morning for 4.5d. when she gets her allowance, and
has done this for the last ten years as regularly as the week comes
round. As long as she does not let the flat iron actually go we know
that she can still worry out her financial problems in her own hugger-
mugger way and had better be left to do so. If the flat iron were to go
beyond redemption, we should know that it was time to interfere. I do
not know why, but there is something about her which always reminds me of
a woman who was as unlike her as one person can be to another--I mean
Ernest's mother.

The last time I had a long gossip with her was about two years ago when
she came to me instead of to Ernest. She said she had seen a cab drive
up just as she was going to enter the staircase, and had seen Mr
Pontifex's pa put his Beelzebub old head out of the window, so she had
come on to me, for she hadn't greased her sides for no curtsey, not for
the likes of him. She professed to be very much down on her luck. Her
lodgers did use her so dreadful, going away without paying and leaving
not so much as a stick behind, but to-day she was as p