Poor Lady Lombard, when once that defunct Dowager Marchioness was let loose upon her, felt that her fate was sealed. It was not for her, the widow of a man who had been knighted, to fly in the face of the peerage; so she humbly authorised the removal of the Lombard arms, implored Perquisite to arrange the rooms as she had been accustomed to set out those of the poor dear Marchioness, and betook herself to the sanctity of her own boudoir, leaving the field to the virago, to whom she paid £60 per annum for keeping her in a continual state of moral bondage. But while such scenes as the foregoing were enacting in the upper portions of the establishment, the French _chef de cuisine_, Monsieur Hector Achille Ulisse Abelard d’Haricots, was making a perfect Pandemonium of the lower regions. The physical energy displayed by that accomplished foreigner was truly admirable, his ubiquity was marvellous; the tassel at the top of his white night-cap appeared to have been multiplied infinitesimally and to pervade space, the sound of his polyglot exhortations and reflections re-echoed through the lofty servants’ offices. Wonderful were the strange oaths he poured forth, when Antoine, a long, limp, shambling French lad, “_son élève_, zie son of--_hélas! baigné des larmes_, he even till at present scarcely could pronounce her name--his angelic sister, since some time entombed, having espoused _un brave Anglais_, his long-lost Louise Amélie Marie-Antoinette de Brownsmit, née d’Haricots,”--when this unworthy offspring of international alliance committed some unpardonable artistic error, and unlike “Polly” of lyrical celebrity, did _not_ “put the kettle on,” or “take it off again,” exactly at the critical moment. Deep and nasal were his ejaculations when some obtuse butcher’s boy would not understand his “Anglishe,” which that somewhat apocryphal personage, “_ce brave garçon_ Brownsmit” (who was Hector Achille’s Mrs. Harris, and was consequently brought forward on all occasions), had declared he spoke like a native. “_Mais, que diable!_ vot is zies?” he would exclaim, raising his eyeglass to examine with a face of deep disgust a shin of beef; “vot is zies? Did I not ordaire _un gigot_, vot you call a leg of ship, and ’ere you ’ave transported to me--_ah, que c’est dégoutant!_--zie stump of a cow: _qu’ils sont bêtes, ces Anglais_--takes ’im avay.”