nisba!"

Which I am obliged to confess is my name. A pretty one and proper one
enough when it was given to me: but, a good many years out of date now,
and always sounding particularly high-flown and comical from his lips. So
I said, sharply:

"Though it is Sophonisba, Jarber, you are not obliged to mention it, that
_I_ see."

In reply to this observation, the ridiculous man put the tips of my five
right-hand fingers to his lips, and said again, with an aggravating
accent on the third syllable:

"Sophon_is_ba!"

I don't burn lamps, because I can't abide the smell of oil, and wax
candles belonged to my day. I hope the convenient situation of one of my
tall old candlesticks on the table at my elbow will be my excuse for
saying, that if he did that again, I would chop his toes with it. (I am
sorry to add that when I told him so, I knew his toes to be tender.) But,
really, at my time of life and at Jarber's, it is too much of a good
thing. There is an orchestra still standing in the open air at the
Wells, before which, in the presence of a throng of fine company, I have
walked a minuet with Jarber. But, there is a house still standing, in
which I have worn a pinafore, and had a tooth drawn by fastening a thread
to the tooth and the door-handle, and toddling away from the door. And
how should I look now, at my years, in a pinafore, or having a door for
my dentist?

Besides, Jarber always was more or less an absurd man. He was sweetly
dressed, and beautifully perfumed, and many girls of my day would have
given their ears for him; though I am bound to add that he never cared a
fig for them, or their advances either, and that he was very constant to
me. For, he not only proposed to me before my love-happiness ended in
sorrow, but afterwards too: not once, nor yet twice: nor will we say how
many times. However many they were, or however few they were, the last
time he paid me that compliment was immediately after he had presented me
with a digestive dinner-pill stuck on the point of a pin. And I said on
that occasion, laughing heartily, "Now, Jarber, if you don't know that
two people whose united ages would make about a hundred and fifty, have
got to be old, I do; and I beg to swallow this nonsense in the form of
this pill" (which I took on the spot), "and I request to, hear no more of
it."

After that, he conducted himself pretty well. He was always a little
squeezed man, was Jarber, in little sprigged waist