infested with strange terrors, with an absolute power of its own, and the guilty conscience will become afraid. All this happened in regard to Mrs. Brumby’s manuscript. “Dear, dear, yes;--Mrs. Brumby!” we would catch ourselves exclaiming with that silent inward voice which occasionally makes itself audible to most of us. And then, quite silently, without even whispered violence, we would devote Mrs. Brumby to the infernal gods. And so the packet remained amidst the heap,--perhaps for a fortnight. “There’s a lady waiting in your room, Sir!” This was said to us one morning on our reaching our office by the lad whom we used to call our clerk. He is now managing a red-hot Tory newspaper down in Barsetshire, has a long beard, a flaring eye, a round belly, and is upon the whole the most arrogant personage we know. In the days of Mrs. Brumby he was a little wizened fellow about eighteen years old, but looking three years younger, modest, often almost dumb, and in regard to ourselves not only reverential but timid. We turned upon him in great anger. What business had any woman to be in our room in our absence? Were not our orders on this subject exact and very urgent? Was he not kept at an expense of 14_s._ a week,--we did not actually throw the amount in his teeth, but such was intended to be the effect of our rebuke,--at 14_s._ a week, paid out of our own pocket,--nominally, indeed, as a clerk, but chiefly for the very purpose of keeping female visitors out of our room? And now, in our absence and in his, there was actually a woman among the manuscripts! We felt from the first moment that it was Mrs. Brumby. With bated breath and downcast eyes the lad explained to us his inability to exclude her. “She walked straight in, right over me,” he said; “and as for being alone,--she hasn’t been alone. I haven’t left her, not a minute.” We walked at once into our own room, feeling how fruitless it was to discuss the matter further with the boy in the passage, and there we found Mrs. Brumby seated in the chair opposite to our own. We had gathered ourselves up, if we may so describe an action which was purely mental, with a view to severity. We thought that her intrusion was altogether unwarrantable, and that it behoved us to let her know that such was the case. We entered the room with a clouded brow, and intended that she should read our displeasure in our eyes. But Mrs. Brumby could,--“gather herself up,” quite as well as we could do, and she did so. She also could call clouds to her forehead and could flash anger from her eyes. “Madam,” we exclaimed, as we paused for a moment, and looked at her.