bons would have gone stark-mad. Miserable woman! how she worked
and fumed, and panted and tugged, and kneaded and rolled, and stuffed and
seasoned, and skewered and basted, and beat, on that day! From soup to
dessert and from dessert to soup, over and over again, she toiled; fish,
flesh, fowl, vegetables, gravies, were all mingled in her head
helter-skelter. She had dreamed of nothing else during the whole of the
previous night, excepting a short interlude in the aforesaid dream, when
she was night-mared by a fat pig, bestrode by a half-starved boy, who was
all eyes. And now, as the day waned and the hour of the dinner approached,
her ferment increased, until, to use a metaphor, she had worked herself up
into a mental lather. Her voice was in every quarter, and so was her
quick, hurried step. She was in the entry, up stairs, in the pantry, in
the kitchen and in the cellar; at the street-door giving orders to the
grocer's dirty boy to bring the cinnamon and allspice, and not to forget
the sugar and butter, and to be sure to recollect the anchovies and
pickles. The next moment she was scolding the butcher, because he had been
late with the chops and cutlets; and every five minutes she thrust her
head into the room to look at the clock, lest Time should steal a march
upon her. Eleven, twelve, one, two o'clock. The tumult increased. Mrs.
Chowles, punctual to her promise, made her appearance; forthwith dived
into the kitchen, and did not emerge until dinner-time. The only person
utterly unmoved was Harson, who had attended to his part of the business
by looking after the wine, and who now sat with his feet to the fire,
resolved to trouble his head about nothing, and apparently more asleep
than awake. At times, however, he rose and went to one corner of the room,
where a small boy who seemed to be worn down by suffering, lay coiled up
and sound asleep on a chair-cushion. The old man bent over him, gently
parted the hair from his forehead, and then rising up, somewhat red in the
face from the exertion, rubbed his hands one over the other by way of
indicating that all was as it should be; stole back to his seat on tiptoe,
lest he should awaken him, and forthwith relapsed into his former state of
dreamy abstraction. Nothing could arouse him; not even the house-keeper
when she dashed into the room with a face at roasting heat, and demanded
the key of the wine-cellar. It was handed to her mechanically, and
mechanically pocketed when