Here there arose a chatter which Nephelo found to be about matters that, unlike the water topic, did not at all interest himself. There was a rustle and a movement; and a creaking noise approached the drawing-room, which Nephelo discovered presently to be caused by Papa’s boots as he marched upstairs after his post-prandial slumberings. There was more talk uninteresting to the fairy; Nephelo, therefore, became drowsy; his drowsiness might at the Same time have been aggravated by the close confinement he experienced in an unwholesome atmosphere beneath the muffin-plate. He was aroused by a great clattering; this the maid caused who was carrying him down stairs upon a tray with all the other tea-things. From a sweet dream of nuptials with Cirrha, Nephelo was awakened to the painful consciousness that he had not yet succeeded in effecting any great good for the human race; he had but rinsed a tea-pot. With a faint impulse of hope the desponding fairy noticed that the slop-basin in which he sate was lifted from the tray, in a few minutes after the tray had been deposited upon the kitchen-dresser. Pity poor Nephelo! By a remorseless scullery-maid he was dashed rudely from the basin into a trough of stone, from which he tumbled through a hole placed there on purpose to engulf him,—tumbled through into a horrible abyss. This abyss was a long dungeon running from back to front beneath the house, built of bricks—rotten now, and saturated with moisture. Some of the bricks had fallen in, or crumbled into nothingness; and Nephelo saw that the soil without the dungeon was quite wet. The dungeon-floor was coated with pollutions, travelled over by a sluggish shallow stream, with which the fairy floated. The whole dungeon’s atmosphere was foul and poisonous. Nephelo found now what those exhalations were which rose through every opening in the house, through vent-holes and the burrowings of rats; for rats and other vermin tenanted this noisome den. This was the pestilential gallery called by the good people of the house, their drain. A trap-door at one end confined the fairy in this place with other Water-Drops, until there should be collected a sufficient body of them to negotiate successfully for egress.