, or had a clean face,
or took off the coarse apron, or looked out of any of the windows, or
stood at the street door for a breath of air, or had any rest or
enjoyment whatever. Nobody ever came to see her, nobody spoke of her,
nobody cared about her.

"Now," said Dick, one day, 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. I _should_ like to know how they
use her!"

At that moment he caught a glimpse 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, he groped his way down, and arrived at
the kitchen door 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 was screwed up so tight as
to hold no more than a thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up;
the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all
padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched on.

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 opened the safe, and
brought from it a dreary waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as
Stonehenge. This she placed before the small servant, and then, taking
up a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it.

"Do you see this?" she said, slicing off about two square inches of cold
mutton, and holding it out on the point of a fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see
every shred of it 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; "y