Do yer w'ust.
Yours to command,

"`Willum.'"

There was no resisting such arguments. Mrs Stoutley smiled through her
tears as she accepted the money. Captain Wopper rose, crammed the empty
canvas bag into his pocket, and hastily retired, with portions of the
bonnet attached to him.

"Susan," said Mrs Stoutley, on the maid answering her summons, "we
shall start for London tomorrow, or the day after, so, pray, set about
packing up without delay."

"Very well, ma'am," replied Susan, whose eyes were riveted with an
expression of surprised curiosity on the cane-bottomed chair.

"It is my bonnet Susan," said the lady, looking in the same direction
with a sad smile. "Captain Wopper sat down on it by mistake. You had
better remove it."

To remove it was a feat which even Susan, with all her ready wit and
neatness of hand, could not have accomplished without the aid of brush
and shovel. She, therefore, carried it off chair and all, to the
regions below, where she and Gillie went into convulsions over it.

"Oh! Susan," exclaimed the blue spider, "wot would I not have given to
have seed him a-doin' of it! Only think! The ribbons, flowers, and
straw in one uniwarsal mush! _Wot_ a grindin' there must ave bin! I
heer'd the Purfesser the other day talkin' of wot he calls
glacier-haction--how they flutes the rocks an' grinds in a most musical
way over the boulders with crushin' wiolence; but wot's glacier haction
to _that_?"

Susan admitted that it was nothing; and they both returned at intervals
in the packing, during the remainder of that day, to have another look
at the bonnet-debris, and enjoy a fresh explosion over it.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

MYSTERIOUS PROCEEDINGS OF THE CAPTAIN AND GILLIE.

We are back again in London--in Mrs Roby's little cabin at the top of
the old tenement in Grubb's Court.

Captain Wopper is there, of course. So is Mrs Roby. Gillie White is
there also, and Susan Quick. The Captain is at home. The two latter
are on a visit--a social tea-party. Little Netta White, having
deposited Baby White in the mud at the lowest corner of the Court for
greater security, is waiting upon them--a temporary handmaiden,
relieving, by means of variety, the cares of permanent nursehood. Mrs
White is up to the elbows in soap-suds, taking at least ocular and vocal
charge of the babe in the mud, and her husband is--"drunk, as usual?"
No--there is a change there. Good of some kind has been somewhere