Their settled income consisted of his half-pay and some very small property which belonged to her. Together they might perhaps have possessed £150 per annum. When we knew them they had lodgings in Harpur Street, near Theobald’s Road, and she had resolved to push her way in London as a woman of literature. She had been told that she would have to deal with hard people, and that she must herself be hard;--that advantage would be taken of her weakness, and that she must therefore struggle vehemently to equal the strength of those with whom she would be brought in contact;--that editors, publishers, and brother authors would suck her brains and give her nothing for them, and that, therefore, she must get what she could out of them, giving them as little as possible in return. It was an evil lesson that she had learned; but she omitted nothing in the performance of the duties which that lesson imposed upon her. She first came to us with a pressing introduction from an acquaintance of ours who was connected with a weekly publication called the “Literary Curricle.” The “Literary Curricle” was not in our estimation a strong paper, and we will own that we despised it. We did not think very much of the acquaintance by whom the strong introductory letter was written. But Mrs. Brumby forced herself into our presence with the letter in her hand, and before she left us extracted from us a promise that we would read a manuscript which she pulled out of a bag which she carried with her. Of that first interview a short account shall be given, but it must first be explained that the editor of the “Literary Curricle” had received Mrs. Brumby with another letter from another editor, whom she had first taken by storm without any introduction whatever. This first gentleman, whom we had not the pleasure of knowing, had, under what pressure we who knew the lady can imagine, printed three or four short paragraphs from Mrs. Brumby’s pen. Whether they reached publication we never could learn, but we saw the printed slips. He, however, passed her on to the “Literary Curricle,”--which dealt almost exclusively in the reviewing of books,--and our friend at the office of that influential “organ” sent her to us with an intimation that her very peculiar and well-developed talents were adapted rather for the creation of tales, or the composition of original treatises, than for reviewing. The letter was very strong, and we learned afterwards that Mrs. Brumby had consented to abandon her connection with the “Literary Curricle” only on the receipt of a letter in her praise that should be very strong indeed. She rejected the two first offered to her, and herself dictated the epithets with which the third was loaded. On no other terms would she leave the office of the “Literary Curricle.”