nose on yer face, (an' a purty wan it is),
though I haven't got the powers of a lawyer, nor yit a praist? Didn't a
drippin' wet sailor come to our door at the dead o' night an' ring the
bell as bowld as brass, an' when Mrs Niven, whose intellect was niver
much beyond that of a poplypus--"

"What's a poplypus?" interrupted cook.

"Well now," remonstrated Dan, "I ain't 'xactly a walkin' dictionary; but
I b'lieve it's a baist o' the say what hain't got nothin' but a body an'
a stummik, indeed I'm not sure but that it's all stummik together, with
just legs enough to move about with, or may be a fin or two, an' a hole
to let in the wittles; quite in your line, by the way, Miss Bounder."

"Imperance!" ejaculated cook.

"No offence," said Dan; "but `to resoom the thread o' the narrative,' as
the story books say, Mrs Niven she opened the door, and the drippin'
wet sailor he puts a little wet spalpeen in her arms, an' goes right off
without so much as by your lave, an' that's all we know about it. An'
Grumpy he goes ragin' about the house sayin' he'll have nothin' to do
wi' the poor little thing--who's not so little naither, bein' a
ten-year-old if she's an hour, an' a purty sweet face to boot--an' that
he'll send her to the workus' or pris'n, or anywhere; but in his house
she's not to stop another day. Well, not havin' the management o' the
whole of this world's affairs, (fort'nately, else a scrubbily managed
world it would be), Grumpy finds out that when he wants to send little
Emmie, (as she calls herself), off, she's knocked down by a ragin'
fever, an' the doctor he says it's as much as her life is worth to move
her. So Grumpy has to grin and bear it, and there's little Emmie lyin'
at this minit in our best bed, (where Mrs Niven put her the moment she
was took bad), a-tossin' her purty arms in the air, an' makin' her
yellow hair fly over the pillows, and kickin' off the close like a young
angel in a passion, and callin' on her mama in a voice that would make a
stone immage weep, all the while that Miss Penelope is snivellin' on one
side o' the bed, an' Mrs Niven is snortin' on the other."

"Poor dear," said Susan in a low voice, devoting herself with
intensified zeal to the tea-pot, while sympathetic tears moistened her
eyes.

I interrupted the conversation at this point by entering the kitchen
with my note to my friend Stuart. I had to pass through the kitchen to
my back garden when I wished to leave my house by