Our hero said nothing, but he thought the Fates could not have been in one of the most amiable of humours when they delivered him into the hands of Mr. Peter Veriquear. Returning from this dim perambulation, the merchant led his assistant down a flight of brick steps into an underground kitchen, where a supper, consisting of a round mahogany-coloured cheese, which Colin mistook for a huge cricket-ball, three gaunt sticks of celery, and a brown loaf was placed upon a small round oak table, having one stem in the centre, and three crooked feet at the bottom, after the fashion of a washerwoman's Italian iron. The family of the Veriquears was here assembled. Mrs. Veri-quear, a sharp-nosed pyroligneous-acid-looking woman, sat on a low chair by the fireside, nursing a baby; a child of eighteen months old slept close by her in a wicker basket, which served at once for cradle and coach-body, as occasion might require, it being ingeniously contrived to fit a frame-work on four wheels, which stood up stairs, and thus served to carry the children about on a Sunday; while two other youngsters were squabbling on the hearthstone about their respective titles to a threelegged stool; and another, the eldest, was penning most villanous pot-hooks on the back of a piece of butter-paper, under the casual but severe superintendence of his worthy mother. Farthest removed from the fire, as well as the candle-light, sat one who was _in_ the family, though not of it, a maiden of nineteen, Miss Aphra Marvel, a niece of Mr. Veriquear, who had been bequeathed to him by her father upon his death-bed, along with a small tenement worth about fifteen pounds a-year, the income from which was considered as a set-off against the cost of her board and bringing up. But could her departing parent have foreknown the great and multifarious services which his daughter was destined to perform in the family of his wife's brother, it is more than probable he would have acknowledged the propriety of charging fifteen pounds per annum as a compensation for her labour, rather than have left that sum in yearly requital of her cost. From twelve years of age to the present time, her duty it had been to make the fires, sweep the house, wash and nurse the babies, as they successively appeared upon the Veriquear stage of the world, wait on Mrs. Veriquear, prepare meals, make the beds, mend all the little masters' clothes, and, in short, do all and everything which could possibly require to be done; and yet she was regarded by her mistress and the children (whom she industriously instructed to that end) as an interloper, who was partly eating the bread out of their mouths every day, and consequently contributing to the eventual diminution of that stock which ought to be applied exclusively to the advancement of their own prospects in after-life.