g for that goal at her
right hand? He felt at the troubled heart and touched two fingers on the
rib, mock-quietingly, and smiled. Then with great deliberation he rose,
lit a candle, unlocked a case of pocket-pistols, and loaded them: but a
second idea coming into his head, he drew the bullet out of one, and lay
down again with a luxurious speculation on the choice any hand might
possibly make of the life-sparing or death-giving of those two weapons.
In his neat half-slumber he was twice startled by a report of fire-arms
in a church, when a crowd of veiled women and masked men rushed to the
opening, and a woman throwing up the veil from her face knelt to a corpse
that she lifted without effort, and weeping, laid it in a grave, where it
rested and was at peace, though multitudes hurried over it, and new stars
came and went, and the winds were strange with new tongues. The sleeper
saw the morning upon that corpse when light struck his eyelids, and he
awoke like a man who knew no care.

His landlady's little female scrubber was working at the grate in his
sitting-room. He had endured many a struggle to prevent service of this
nature being done for him by one of the sex--at least, to prevent it
within his hearing and sight. He called to her to desist; but she replied
that she had her mistress's orders. Thereupon he maintained that the
grate did not want scrubbing. The girl took this to be a matter of
opinion, not a challenge to controversy, and continued her work in
silence. Irritated by the noise, but anxious not to seem harsh, he said:
"What on earth are you about, when there was no fire there yesterday?"

"There ain't no stuff for afire now, sir," said she.

"I tell you I did not light it."

"It's been and lit itself then," she mumbled.

"Do you mean to say you found the fire burnt out, when you entered the
room this morning?"

She answered that she had found it so, and lots of burnt paper lying
about.

The symbolism of this fire burnt out, that had warmed and cheered none,
oppressed his fancy, and he left the small maid-of-all-work to triumph
with black-lead and brushes.

She sang out, when she had done: "If you please, sir, missus have had a
hamper up from the country, and would you like a country aig, which is
quite fresh, and new lay. And missus say, she can't trust the bloaters
about here bein' Yarmouth, but there's a soft roe in one she've squeezed;
and am I to stop a water-cress woman, when the last one so