"Hu-s-h--not a syllable about it, or the children would run after me as a sight. You must have generalized in a remarkable way, Miles, after you sunk the last time, without much hope of coming up again?" "Indeed, my friend, you are quite right in your conjecture. So near a view of death is apt to make us all take rapid and wide views of the past. I believe it even crossed my mind that _you_ would miss me sadly." "Ay," returned Marble, with feeling; "them are the moments to bring out the truth! Not a juster idee passed your brain than _that_, Master Miles, I can assure you. Missed you! I would have bought a boat and started for Marble Land, never again to quit it, the day after the funeral. But there stands your cook, fidgeting and looking this way, as if she had a word to put in on the occasion. This expl'ite of Neb's will set the niggers up in the world; and it wouldn't surprise me if it cost you a suit of finery all round." "A price I will cheerfully pay for my life. It is as you say--Dido certainly wishes to speak to me, and I must give her an invitation to come nearer." Dido Clawbonny was the cook of the family, and the mother of Chloe. Whatever hypercriticism might object to her colour, which was a black out of which all the gloss had fairly glistened itself over the fire, no one could deny her being full blown. Her weight was exactly two hundred, and her countenance a strange medley of the light-heartedness of her race, and the habitual and necessary severity of a cook. She often protested that she was weighed down by "responserbility;" the whole of the discredit of overdone beef, or under-done fish, together with those which attach themselves to heavy bread, lead-like buckwheat-cakes, and a hundred other similar cases, belonging exclusively to her office. She had been twice married, the last connection having been formed only a twelvemonth before. In obedience to a sign, this important lady now approached. "Welcome back, Masser Mile," Dido began with a curtsey, meaning "Welcome back from being half-drowned;" "ebberybody _so_ grad you isn't hurt!" "Thank you, Dido--thank you with all my heart. If I have gained nothing else by the ducking, I have gained a knowledge of the manner in which my servants love me." "Lor' bless us all! How we help it, Masser Mile? As if a body can posserbly help how lub come and go! Lub jest like religion, Masser Mile--some get him, and some don't. But lub for a young masser and a young missus, sah--_dat_ jest as nat'ral, as lub for ole masser and ole missus. I t'ink nut'in' of neider." Luckily, I was too well acquainted with the Clawbonny dialect to need a vocabulary in order to understand the meaning of Dido. All she wished to express was the idea that it was so much a matter of course for the dependants of the family to love its heads, that she did not think the mere circumstance, in itself, worthy of a second thought.