great tin cage, from between the bars
of which an intelligent parrot chatters--"my lady, my lady, my lady!"
There is a cavernous air about the place, which gives out a sickly odor,
exciting the suggestion that it might at some time have served as a
receptacle for those second-hand coffins the State buries its poor in.

"Well! who are you? And what do you want? You have brought letters, I
s'pose?" a sharp, squeaking voice, speaks rapidly.

The young man, without waiting for an invitation to sit down, takes
nervously a seat at the side-table, saying he has come on a mission of
love.

"Love! love! eh? Young man--know that you have got into the wrong
house!" Mrs. Swiggs shakes her head, squeaking out with great animation.

There she sits, Milton's "Paradise Lost" in her witch-like fingers,
herself lean enough for the leanest of witches, and seeming to have
either shrunk away from the faded black silk dress in which she is clad,
or passed through half a century of starvation merely to bolster up her
dignity. A sharp, hatchet-face, sallow and corrugated; two wicked gray
eyes, set deep in bony sockets; a long, irregular nose, midway of which
is adjusted a pair of broad, brass-framed spectacles; a sunken,
purse-drawn mouth, with two discolored teeth protruding from her upper
lip; a high, narrow forehead, resembling somewhat crumpled parchment; a
dash of dry, brown hair relieving the ponderous border of her
steeple-crowned cap, which she seems to have thrown on her head in a
hurry; a moth-eaten, red shawl thrown spitefully over her shoulders,
disclosing a sinewy and sassafras-colored neck above, and the small end
of a gold chain in front, and, reader, you have the august Mrs. Swiggs,
looking as if she diets on chivalry and sour krout. She is indeed a nice
embodiment of several of those qualities which the State clings
tenaciously to, and calls its own, for she lives on the labor of eleven
aged negroes, five of whom are cripples.

The young man smiles, as Mrs. Swiggs increases the velocity of her
rocking, lays her right hand on the table, rests her left on her Milton,
and continues to reiterate that he has got into the wrong house.

"I have no letter, Madam--"

"I never receive people without letters--never!" again she interrupts,
testily.

"But you see, Madam--"

"No I don't. I don't see anything about it!" again she interposes,
adjusting her spectacles, and scanning him anxiously from head to foot.
"Ah, yes (she twi