"Lenette, I can't hear very distinctly what it is--but you're up to something or other in there that I can _not_ stand. For God's dear sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this one day--come here, let me see you." She answered, all out of breath with hard work-- "I'm not doing anything." He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a magnified canaries' breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in measured accents-- "You're at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know quite well that I'm sitting there working like a slave for you and myself too, and that I've been writing away for the last hour with scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your cartridges at one shot, for God's sake, and don't finish me off altogether with that rag of yours." Lenette, full of astonishment said, "It's simply impossible, old man. that you can hear me in the next room"--and polished away harder than ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a louder tone, "Come, get up!--It's exactly that which I complain of, that I _can't_ hear you in the next room; I'm obliged to rack my brains to guess what you're at--and the only ideas left in my head are connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can _not_ stand, is a _quiet_ noise." All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out of the room, rag and all, saying-- "It does seem a little hard that, while I'm labouring away here with all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in my own room, and that an author's very bed should be turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his ears out of it. There, I shan't be writing while we're at dinner, I'll talk the thing out at full length with you then."