a broke over London like
a bursting meteor. Such panic had not been known, I believe, since the
time of the plague, in the reign of Charles II., as painted (beyond any
skill of the brush) by the simple and wonderful pen of Defoe. There
had been in the interval many seasons--or at least I am informed so--of
sickness more widely spread, and of death more frequent, if not so
sudden. But now this new plague, attacking so harshly a man's most
perceptive and valued part, drove rich people out of London faster than
horses (not being attacked) could fly. Well, used as I was to a good
deal of poison in dealing with my colours, I felt no alarm on my own
account, but was anxious about my landlady. This was an excellently
honest woman of fifty-five summers at the utmost, but weakly confessing
to as much as forty. She had made a point of insisting upon a brisket of
beef and a flat-polled cabbage for dinner every Saturday; and the same,
with a "cowcumber," cold on Sunday; and for supper a soft-roed herring,
ever since her widowhood.

"Mrs. Whitehead," said I--for that was her name, though she said she did
not deserve it; and her hair confirmed her in that position by growing
darker from year to year--"Madam, allow me to beg you to vary your diet
a little at this sad time."

"I varies it every day, Mr. Bistre," she answered somewhat snappishly.
"The days of the week is not so many but what they all come round
again."

For the moment I did not quite perceive the precision of her argument;
but after her death I was able to do more justice to her intellect. And,
unhappily, she was removed to a better world on the following Sunday.

To a man in London of quiet habits and regular ways and periods there
scarcely can be a more desperate blow than the loss of his landlady.
It is not only that his conscience pricks him for all his narrow,
plagiaristic, and even irrational suspicions about the low level of his
tea caddy, or a neap tide in his brandy bottle, or any false evidence of
the eyes (which ever go spying to lock up the heart), or the ears, which
are also wicked organs--these memories truly are grievous to him, and
make him yearn now to be robbed again; but what he feels most sadly is
the desolation of having nobody who understands his locks. One of the
best men I ever knew was so plagued with his sideboard every
day for two years, after dinner, that he married a little new
maid-of-all-work--because she was a blacksmith's daughter.