She took Jimmy’s last sixpence gratefully, and asked him to stop and share the half-quartern of gin which her youngest little girl but three ran to the public house to fetch. Very likely he stayed; it would have been just like him. He was a crank. Fancy a man offering Paul de Kock and Flaubert to an Inn of Court laundress! He paid for the gin, but he lightly ignored the two months’ money he owed her, and she never reminded him. His sitting room was full of books, on open shelves and thick with dust. They were the admiration of Mrs. Morey. “I thought Mr. Slobkins ’ad a lot,” she said, “’im as I worked for in Furnival’s. ’E’s a magistrate or a clerk or somethin’ o’ that sort, yer see. But, lor, this lot bangs ’is.” Stanch Mrs. Morey! She was a little roly-poly kind of woman, with eyes like ripe sloes, and she worked for Jimmy for six months without ever receiving a penny. “My ’usband ’ud kill me if ’e knowed,” she said, smiling plaintively as she scrubbed the boards. “’E’s bin out o’ work for nearly a year. It’s hard work for me to fill the kids’ mouths and keep ’im in grub and pocket money. But ’e’s a good ’usband when ’e aint drunk. I wish ’e ’ad more luck, that’s all.” “What is his trade?” asked Jimmy languidly--he was always languid until the gas lamps were lighted. The little woman tossed her head. “My ’usband aint _that_ sort, jest able to do one kind o’ work. ’E can turn ’is ’and to anythin’. But I wish ’e wasn’t quite so partikler.” She came to me privately when Jimmy’s health began to break. She said that he didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, that it worried her awful, that she feared he was going off in a galloping decline. “It’s jest the way my niece’s ’usband was took,” she concluded. “’E used to drive a vegetable cart, and ’e’s layin’ in the Brompton Simmetery. As nice a young man as ever you see, and played the flute bootiful. ’E was took bad in May and dead in December. He was indeed, and ’er with six little children--all babies, as you might say, and another on the road--if you’ll excuse my free way of speakin’. My niece she’s got the flute under a glass case in the parlor window, for the mountings is silver.”