With that due regard to the interest of “her lady” which distinguishes every “monthly nuss,” when in no way benefited by the defrauding of her, Mrs. Pilchers proceeded to search the house in a state of high excitement for the truant journeyman, and learning from Mrs. Fokesell that the man was engaged in the drawing-room, at an odd job for her, the consciousness that this same odd job was being performed at “her lady’s” expense, caused Mrs. Pilchers, in the height of her indignation, to give a jerk of her christening cap, that made its ultramarine geraniums bob backwards and forwards on their wire stalks like the ship in the paper sea of the clock-work pictures. The “nuss” then bounced out of the kitchen as if she were a baby’s india-rubber ball, inflated with anger, mentally dilating on the “unheerd on imperence” of the act, and made the best of her way to the first floor in quest of her carpenter. Having called the man out of the room, Mrs. Pilchers communicated to him “just a bit of her mind” on the heinousness of his allowing “any one” to take an hour of his time out of “her lady’s half day;” and having lectured the carpenter in her most moral style, she desired him to take his tools down that minute and do the chair, or she would have in “somebody what would.” The poor man, who, like the rest of the “jobbing operatives,” was of rather an obsequious, if not servile turn, stammered out an apology, and returned in a state of considerable flurry to the drawing-room to fetch the saw required for the operation. For fear of giving offence to Mrs. Fokesell, the carpenter descended the stairs as softly as he could, but he had scarcely reached the passage before the drawing-room bell was rung violently, and Mrs. Fokesell, suspecting that “nuss” had been and taken the man off the job she had set him, hurried up from the kitchen. The carpenter, who shrewdly imagined that the bell was rung to inquire into the cause of his leaving his work in the drawing-room before it was finished, and being anxious, above all things, not to give offence to the landlady, who was one of his best customers, hastened into the parlour to get Mrs. Quinine’s job over as quickly as possible. With scarcely a thought as to what he was doing, the nervous man rushed saw in hand to the window, where he had left the arm-chair, and perceiving the wooden leg of Major Oldschool protruding from behind the window curtain, he, in the flurry of the moment, mistook it for the upper fore-leg of the chair that he had left lying on its side, and immediately set to work to reduce it one half.