t then married; and it was curious to see how he--who, as
we have seen in the case of Mrs. Cat, had been as great a tiger and
domestic bully as any extant--now, by degrees, fell into a quiet
submission towards his enormous Countess; who ordered him up and down as
a lady orders her footman, who permitted him speedily not to have a will
of his own, and who did not allow him a shilling of her money without
receiving for the same an accurate account.

How was it that he, the abject slave of Madam Silverkoop, had been
victorious over Mrs. Cat? The first blow is, I believe, the decisive
one in these cases, and the Countess had stricken it a week after their
marriage;--establishing a supremacy which the Count never afterwards
attempted to question.

We have alluded to his Excellency's marriage, as in duty bound, because
it will be necessary to account for his appearance hereafter in a more
splendid fashion than that under which he has hitherto been known to us;
and just comforting the reader by the knowledge that the union, though
prosperous in a worldly point of view, was, in reality, extremely
unhappy, we must say no more from this time forth of the fat and
legitimate Madam de Galgenstein. Our darling is Mrs. Catherine, who had
formerly acted in her stead; and only in so much as the fat Countess
did influence in any way the destinies of our heroine, or those wise
and virtuous persons who have appeared and are to follow her to her end,
shall we in any degree allow her name to figure here. It is an awful
thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of
some little little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of FATE,
and see how our destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance, or on the
turning of a street, or on somebody else's turning of a street, or
on somebody else's doing of something else in Downing Street or in
Timbuctoo, now or a thousand years ago. Thus, for instance, if Miss
Poots, in the year 1695, had never been the lovely inmate of a Spielhaus
at Amsterdam, Mr. Van Silverkoop would never have seen her; if the day
had not been extraordinarily hot, the worthy merchant would never have
gone thither; if he had not been fond of Rhenish wine and sugar, he
never would have called for any such delicacies; if he had not called
for them, Miss Ottilia Poots would never have brought them, and partaken
of them; if he had not been rich, she would certainly have rejected all
the advances made to