ss Drew was pleased to term "lither
laziness;" when, instead of cleaning pans, Maude was thinking poetry.
Alas for little Maude! her vocation was not to think poetry; and it was
to scour pans.

The Palace of Langley, which had become the scene of Maude's
pan-cleaning, was built in a large irregular pile. The kitchen and its
attendant offices were at one end, and over them reigned Ursula Drew,
who, though supreme in her government of Maude, was in reality only a
vice-queen. Over Ursula ruled a man-cook, by name Warine de la
Misericorde, concerning whom his subordinate's standing joke was that
"Misericorde was rarely [extremely] merciless." But this potentate in
his turn owed submission to the master of the household, a very great
gentleman with gold embroidery on his coat, concerning whom Maude's only
definite notion was that he must be courtesied to very low indeed.

Master and mistress were mere names to Maude. The child was
near-sighted, and though, like every other servant in the Palace, she
ate daily in the great hall, her eyes were not sufficiently clear, from
her low place at the extreme end, to make out anything on the distant
dais beyond a number of grey shapeless shadows. She knew when the
royal, and in her eyes semi-celestial persons in question were, or were
not, at home; she had a dim idea that they bore the titles of Earl and
Countess of Cambridge, and that they were nearly related to majesty
itself; she now and then heard Ursula informed that my Lord was pleased
to command a certain dish, or that my Lady had condescended to approve a
particular sauce. She had noticed, moreover, that two of the grey
shadows at the very top of the hall, and therefore among the most
distinguished persons, were smaller than the rest; she inferred that
these ineffable superiors had at least two children, and she often
longed to inspect them within comfortable seeing distance. But no such
good fortune had as yet befallen her. Their apartments were
inaccessible fairy-land, and themselves beings scarcely to be gazed on
with undazzled eyes.

Very monotonous was Maude's new life:--cleaning pans, washing jars,
sorting herbs, scouring pails, running numberless infinitesimal errands,
doing everything that nobody else liked, hard-worked from morning to
night, and called up from her hard pallet to recommence her toil before
she had realised that she was asleep. Ursula's temper, too, did not
improve with time; and Parnel, the