maintained that Mrs. Cæsar Donkin never washed. Well, supposing that she never did? We can be virtuous without soap, I presume. Some of the holiest hermits of antiquity were quite unacquainted with the use of the flesh-brush and the foot-bath. If Mrs. Cæsar Donkin was averse from lavatory exertion, her boarders had never to complain of a deficiency of towels or brown Windsor. Every thing in her house, herself always excepted, was as clean as a new pin. The furniture and metal work were as bright as the sun, and she was one of the spots on it.

The captious complained of her attire; surely she had a right to wear what clothes she liked. Her garments were of silk, although they certianly had seen their best, and perhaps their worst, days; for, short of absolute tatters, they had reached the superlative degree of shabbiness. From Mrs. Cæsar Donkin's girdle there hung a bunch of keys, which gave her a pleasant chatelaine look, compounded of a cellaress in a nunnery and a female warder in the House of Correction. She wore, too, an apron, conjectured, from its colour and texture, to have belonged to Mr. Cæsar Donkin in his early days of snuff-taking, and to have served him as a pocket-handkerchief. When to this you add very roomy list slippers, and a very remarkable brooch set in silver, and the stone of which was very like a petrified whelk, Mrs. Caesar Donkin stands, or rather sits, before you in that unadorned beauty which is said to be adorned the most.

Respecting her companion, Miss Puffin, there is no need to enter into such minuteness of detail. Every body felt and said that Puffin was nobody. Mrs. Cæsar Donkin told her so at least five hundred times a day, and the worthy body seemed perfectly contented to be regarded as a nullity. She was a very placable little woman, with hair that had seemingly been carefully boiled until all the colour had been expressed from it, and with a complexion that had also undergone an analogous process of stewing down. If Puffin never smiled, it may be for the reason that her teeth were uneven, or that she had nothing to laugh at. If she seldom looked you in the face, it was perhaps because her eyes were very weak, and the lids thereof given to inflammation. If her hands were so very thin and bluely transparent, incessant hard work may have been the cause; and if, to sum up her personality, her poor little barége frock was dismally frayed and faded, it may be accounted for by the fact that it was very nearly the only dress which Puffin had

to wear.

Being Nobody did not prevent people occasionally asking, in a lazy kind of way, how she came to be nobody and nothing. A few surmises respecting her were hazarded, but they involved no interest, and were seldom carried out to investigation. Some said she had been a partner of Mrs. Cæsar Donkin, and had been cozened out of her share in the business; others that she had been a boarder with a small annuity which had ceased, and being destitute, was now dependent on Mrs. Cæsar Donkin's bounty, and did what household work she could to assist her, for her

keep. Then there was a party who said that she was a bankrupt dayschool keeper hiding from her creditors. Another risked the conjecture that she was Mrs. Donkin's sister, niece, daughter even; but the most generally received opinion was, that Miss Puffin had been a domestic servant, elevated from the kitchen to the parlour, and admitted to the full confidence of the lady of the house, and intrusted with all her secrets, because "she knew something about her," and could do her an injury if she chose. Don't for one moment imagine that one ten-thousandth part of the charity which exists in London is to be found in the dinner and asylum announcements that appear every day in the newspapers. Puffin was about thirty years of age, and was, it need not be said, "a maiden all forlorn," at whom there is too much reason to fear that "the man all tattered and torn" of the nursery rhyme, albeit excited by the morn-crowing of an early village cock, and an offer from a "priest all shaven and shorn" to perform the marriage service gratuitously, would have turned up his

nose.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SEXAGENARIANS.

THE preparation of a dessert is no such very momentous matter, particularly when there are no strawberries to pick, and no grapes to prune with silver scissors or dress with vine-leaves. Mrs. Cæsar Donkin, however, considered the daily occasion as one of great importance, and, with the assistance of Puffin, went through it with a considerable amount of state and ceremony. The half-hour before dinner was her time for descanting on the virtues and the failings of her boarders, for comparing the experience of the past with the occurrences of the present, and for devising those crafty little additions to her monthly bills which redounded so greatly to the credit of her ingenuity, and were by no means unserviceable in swelling her monthly profits.

"But as for General Tibby, Puffin," Mrs. Cæsar remarked, twisting a raisin which was obviously past service from its stalk, "he must go."

Puffin, who was polishing a pippin, did not verbally respond to this observation; but she gave utterance to a plaintive bleat, which may have been either a negative or an affirmative, or nothing at all, as the case stood.

"You mean that you think he ought to go," pursued Mrs. Donkin, quite satisfied as it seemed with the reply. "I can stand him and his carryings-on no longer. The nasty, mean, old hunks! I wish he'd never come here, that I'm sure I do."

This time Miss Puffin spake: "He's very old," she timidly ventured to remark.

"Old!" repeated the boarding-house keeper; "he's as old as the hills. He's one of the screws out of Noah's ark, and as rusty. What's the good of his being old and half silly, if he's got nothing besides his half-pay and an annuity, which dies with him?”

Miss Puffin winced at the mention of an annuity. It recalled, perhaps, unpleasant reminiscences.

"His half-pay," Mrs. Donkin continued, in a true philanthropic spirit, "he can't help. Not that he ever fought for it, I should imagine. He never went further than Wormwood Scrubbs, you may be sure. But it's his annuity that drives me wild with him. A man who would sink his savings in an annuity, and give up some comfortable thousands in a lump for a paltry six hundred a year, would poison his grandmother."

"Ah, that he would," acquiesced Miss Puffin, who would have agreed with Mrs. Donkin if she had accused General Tibby of a design to blow up the Houses of Parliament or set the Thames on fire.

"The man pays punctually enough," Mrs. Donkin was just enough to admit. "But where's the use of his money, if he's got nothing to leave? He might make his will on the back of a postage-stamp, and his handsomest legacy would be the silver buckle to his stock, his old wig, or his shower-bath. Stop; he's got a rouge-pot too, and a liare's-foot. I'm sick and tired of him, Puffin. He gives himself all the airs of a bashaw of three tails. He grumbles at every thing. He tastes the milk at breakfast before it goes into his tea, and talks of adulteration. He smells his bread, and says he's sure there are ground bones in it. He finds out my extras and scratches them out. He never offers any body a glass of wine, though he drinks shamefully; and, worse than all, he takes my gentlemen out at night, and keeps them till two o'clock in the morning at his nasty clubs, smoking and guzzling, I'll be bound. He's halfruined that poor Mr. Fogo, who was never any thing more than a cottonbroker at Liverpool, but always wishes to pass himself off as a military man."

From the tenor of Mrs. Donkin's remarks it may be reasonably inferred that General Tibby was by no means a favourite with that lady. Previous to the discovery of the annuity, indeed, he had held a high place in her estimation. Although convicted of the heinous offence of having sunk his capital, he might have continued on the footing of an ordinary boarder; but his most unpardonable crime was the seduction into dissipated ways of the ex-cotton-broker Fogo, who was very wealthy and had not invested his property in an annuity.

"Give Tibby warning," was the sententious advice proffered by Miss Puffin when her companion had come to the end of her complaints.

"I must and will," replied Mrs. Cæsar, "though it's a hard matter to lose something very like two hundred a year. But I can't stand him, Puffin, and that's the truth. He ought to be charged a pound a week for his cough, and another pound for the stupid nonsense he talks, and thirty shillings for the trouble he gives the servants for his baths, and his I don't-know-whats, and then he ought to be hung for an old skinflint."

"He's a wretch," Miss Puffin agreed, pensively musing over the plate of figs.

"Ah," retorted Mrs. Donkin, with some asperity, "it's all very well for you to call him a wretch; and yet I've heard you flattering the old nuisance up to his very eyes. You sha'n't sit next to him any more, Puffin."

"I won't," returned Miss P., with perfect equanimity.

"Why don't you try your sheep's eyes upon Mr. Chatwynd," Mrs. Donkin resumed, "or upon Mr. Maunder, or on Captain O'Ballygrumble, or on Mr. Tiddydoll, or on that dear, good, kind, old creature the Governor ?"

It may have been intended as a compliment to speak of Miss Puffin's orbs of vision having any resemblance to sheep's eyes. It would have been nearer the mark to have likened them to those of a lamb sorely afflicted with ophthalmia. To the patient Puffin, however, all epithets were equally indifferent. She was the kind of woman whom you could have called a griffin or a hippopotamus without in the least disturbing her tranquillity.

"Poor old Governor!" she said softly.

She

"Poor old Governor! Rich old Governor, you mean. At all events, if he isn't rich, his daughter must be rolling in money. I believe that if the old gentleman could eat gold, she'd let him have it. She's always bringing him something. She's always making him presents. turns the servants' heads with half-crowns and new caps. She's promised me a gold watch from Benson's in Ludgate Hill on her papa's next birthday. Such a lady as she is too! such horses and carriages, such diamonds and pearls, and such a dear little duck of a Blenheim spaniel !" "I don't like her," Miss Puffin remarked quietly.

"That's because you're jealous of her, you mean-spirited thing. You hate her because she's pretty, and has got plenty of money, and hasn't got a face like a sick rabbit with pink eyes.”

Miss Puffin just raised those same ill-spoken-of eyes to about a level with the scraggy neck of the old woman.

"She's very kind to her father," she returned, "and does her best to make the Governor happy; apart from that, I think-I don't know why, but I'm sure of it-that Mrs. Armytage is a very wicked woman. very laugh makes one shudder."

Her

This was an exceedingly long speech for the ordinarily taciturn Puffin, and she was quite confused with her loquacity; and plunging into silence, proceeded to carry the plates, two and two, from the room. At this stage, it wanting but ten minutes to dinner-time, it was Mrs. Cæsar Donkin's invariable custom to remark that she must really go and make herself tidy. The memory of Puffin ran not to the contrary regarding this remark; and Mrs. Donkin used duly to disappear to some mysterious chamber in the upper stories which served as her sleeping apartment. When she reappeared, her hands were invested with a pair of curiously brown and ragged mittens, in which the fissures of age struggled with the original interstices of the network; and those who were permitted to

approach Mrs. Donkin could not avoid an impression, palpable to the olfactory sense, that the completion of her toilette had been in some way assisted by the consumption, either by herself or by her twin-sister, of some alcoholic preparation into which the cordial known as peppermint had entered.

Miss Puffin took the dessert to the dining-room by easy stages, and had just landed the figs on the sideboard when a double knock of alarming length and resonance echoed through the house.

For the matter of that, all the boarders knocked loud; some whose hands were stiff or chalkstony plied the knocker somewhat tremulously and in uncertain cadence; but all the sexagenarians did their best to produce sonorous rat-tats. Their strength was in the main but labour and sorrow now; and there was some feeble pleasure to be derived even from the power of knocking a good loud series of reverberations. The ring which passed through the lion's head on the door was good to them, and thundered on its little anvil bravely. Mrs. Cæsar Donkin let them knock as vigorously as they could and chose to do. It was an indulgence for which she forebore to charge in the monthly bills.

The double knock, or rather the personage whose advent it announced, was duly ushered upstairs; and a few moments afterwards a succession of double knocks more or less resounding was heard, as the old gentlemen came home from their clubs, their trots in the Park, and the other amusements they devised for killing their old enemy Time. He it was that most of all they had to fear. Like a usurer who begins to have doubts of the solvency of a spendthrift deep in his books, he exacted heavier and heavier interest for every year of life he granted them; yet the poor old moths could not help wasting the brief span that remained to them, and puzzled their wits to get rid of the precious moments that Time in his tolerance permitted them still to enjoy.

Let the venue be changed to the dining-room, an intensely respectable and gloomy apartment of the family-vault order of architecture, the windows of which commanded an extensive view of the premises of a statuary opposite, whose front garden was decorated in a lively manner with cenotaphs, broken columns, monumental tablets, garden vases, the Venus of Milo, the bald-faced stag, the Discobolus, the dog of Alcibiades, the late Mr. Wilberforce, and the Emperor Napoleon. There was the usual sarcophagus wine-cooler under the side-board of the dining-room; a cheerful bust of a Grecian philosopher with his nose broken off; and a water-colour view of a building that might have been either a union workhouse, a baths and washhouses, or a baronial hall, and which seemed to have been borrowed from the fine-arts gallery of a houseagent.

A bell that was suggestive of mingled reminiscences of a sexton's tolling for the departing and of muffins had been tinkling for some five minutes, to warn the inmates of Mrs. Cesar Donkin's establishment that dinner was served; and at a few minutes after seven the old boys came