e seen him embark, and your father may
have carried a musket under him. Your grandmother may have cried huzza
for Marlborough but what is the Prince Duke to you, and did you ever, so
much as hear tell of his name? How many hundred or thousand of years had
that toad lived who was in the coal at the defunct Exhibition?--and yet
he was not a bit better informed than toads seven or eight hundred years
younger.

"Don't talk to me your nonsense about Exhibitions, and Prince Dukes, and
toads in coals, or coals in toads, or what is it?" says granny. "I know
there was a good Queen Charlotte, for she left me snuff; and it comforts
me of a night when I lie awake."

To me there is something very touching in the notion of that little
pinch of comfort doled out to granny, and gratefully inhaled by her in
the darkness. Don't you remember what traditions there used to be of
chests of plate, bulses of diamonds, laces of inestimable value,
sent out of the country privately by the old Queen, to enrich certain
relations in M-ckl-nb-rg Str-l-tz? Not all the treasure went. Non omnis
moritur. A poor old palsied thing at midnight is made happy sometimes
as she lifts her shaking old hand to her nose. Gliding noiselessly
among the beds where lie the poor creatures huddled in their cheerless
dormitory, I fancy an old ghost with a snuff-box that does not creak.
"There, Goody, take of my rappee. You will not sneeze, and I shall not
say 'God bless you.' But you will think kindly of old Queen Charlotte,
won't you? Ah! I had a many troubles, a many troubles. I was a prisoner
almost so much as you are. I had to eat boiled mutton every day: entre
nous, I abominated it. But I never complained. I swallowed it. I made
the best of a hard life. We have all our burdens to bear. But hark! I
hear the cock-crow, and snuff the morning air." And with this the royal
ghost vanishes up the chimney--if there be a chimney in that
dismal harem, where poor old Twoshoes and her companions pass their
nights--their dreary nights, their restless nights, their cold long
nights, shared in what glum companionship, illumined by what a feeble
taper!

"Did I understand you, my good Twoshoes, to say that, your mother was
seven-and-twenty years old when you were born, and that she married your
esteemed father when she herself was twenty-five? 1745, then, was the
date of your dear mother's birth. I dare say her father was absent in
the Low Countries, with his Royal Highness the Du