s brother and his wife live in the next nearest cottage,
and the brother transacts the good lady's business, the nerves not
admitting of her transacting it herself, although they leave her in her
debilitated state something sharper than the finest lancet. Now, the
brother having coughed all night till he coughed himself into such a
perspiration that you might have 'wringed his hair,' according to the
asseveration of eye-witnesses, his wife was sent for to negotiate with
me; and if you could have seen me sitting in the kitchen with the two
old women, endeavoring to make them comprehend that I had no evil
intentions or covert designs, and that I had come down all that way to
take some cottage and had _happened_ to walk down that road and see that
particular one, you would never have forgotten it. Then, to see the
servant-girl run backwards and forwards to the sick man, and when the
sick man had signed one agreement which I drew up and the old woman
instantly put away in a disused tea-caddy, to see the trouble and the
number of messages it took before the sick man could be brought to sign
another (a duplicate) that we might have one apiece, was one of the
richest scraps of genuine drollery I ever saw in all my days. How, when
the business was over, we became conversational; how I was facetious,
and at the same time virtuous and domestic; how I drank toasts in the
beer, and stated on interrogatory that I was a married man and the
father of two blessed infants; how the ladies marveled thereat; how one
of the ladies, having been in London, inquired where I lived, and, being
told, remembered that Doughty Street and the Foundling Hospital were in
the Old Kent Road, which I didn't contradict,--all this and a great deal
more must make us laugh when I return, as it makes me laugh now to think
of. Of my subsequent visit to the upholsterer recommended by the
landlady; of the absence of the upholsterer's wife, and the timidity of
the upholsterer fearful of acting in her absence; of my sitting behind a
high desk in a little dark shop, calling over the articles in
requisition and checking off the prices as the upholsterer exhibited the
goods and called them out; of my coming over the upholsterer's daughter
with many virtuous endearments, to propitiate the establishment and
reduce the bill; of these matters I say nothing, either, for the same
reason as that just mentioned. The discovery of the cottage I seriously
regard as a blessing (not