upon her foot, while convinced that a more rapid
recovery would have taken place but for the backward state of surgical
knowledge. She was confident they might have given her something at the
Hospital to bring it forward, and make some local application--"put
something on" was the expression. She seemed to have based an
unreasonable faith in bread poultices on their successful employment in
entirely different cases.

"Now what, you, got, to, lay out for, the way I look at it,
ma'am,"--thus Mrs. Ragstroar, departing and bearing away the hand she
had lent, to get supper ready for her own inmates--"is to do no more
than you can 'elp, and eat as much as you can get." The good woman then
vanished, leaving the united company's chorus to her remarks still
unfinished when she reached her own door at the top of the Court. For
Uncle Mo, Mr. Alibone, Aunt M'riar, and Dolly and Dave as _claqueurs_,
were unanimous that Mrs. Burr should lie still for six months or so,
relying on her capital, if any; if none, on manna from Heaven.

However, there was little likelihood of Mrs. Burr being in want of a
crust, which is the theoretical minimum needed to sustain life, so long
as Sapps Court recognised its liabilities when any component portion of
it, considered as a residential district, fell on and crushed one of its
residents' insteps. If Mr. Bartlett's repairs had come down on Mrs. Burr
in the fullest sense of the expression, she would certainly--unless she
outlived the impact of two hundred new stocks and three thousand old
bats and closures, deceptively arranged to seem like a wall--have had
the advantage, whatever it is, of decent burial, even if she had not had
a married niece at Clapham, or any other relative elsewhere. So she was
able to abstain without imprudence from immediate efforts to reinstate
her dressmaking connection; and was able, without overtaxing her instep,
to give substantial assistance to Aunt M'riar, who would have had to
refuse a good deal of work just at that time except for her opportune
assistance.

It was a natural corollary of this that Mrs. Prichard's tenancy should
be utilised as a workshop, as Mrs. Burr was now its only occupant; and
that she herself should take her meals below, with Aunt M'riar and the
family. So the red and the blue carpet were not put down just yet a
while, and Uncle Mo he did what he could with the screw here and the
tack there, while Aunt M'riar and Mrs. Burr exercised mysterious