I am sorry to say that she rather took to BLAKE—that outcast of society, And when respectable brothers who were fond of her began to look dubious and to cough, She would say, “Oh, my friends, it’s because I hope to bring this poor benighted soul back to virtue and propriety,” And besides, the poor benighted soul, with all his faults, was uncommonly well off. And when MR. BLAKE’S dissipated friends called his attention to the frown or the pout of her, Whenever he did anything which appeared to her to savour of an unmentionable place, He would say that “she would be a very decent old girl when all that nonsense was knocked out of her,” And his method of knocking it out of her is one that covered him with disgrace. She was fond of going to church services four times every Sunday, and, four or five times in the week, and never seemed to pall of them, So he hunted out all the churches within a convenient distance that had services at different hours, so to speak; And when he had married her he positively insisted upon their going to all of them, So they contrived to do about twelve churches every Sunday, and, if they had luck, from twenty-two to twenty-three in the course of the week. She was fond of dropping his sovereigns ostentatiously into the plate, and she liked to see them stand out rather conspicuously against the commonplace half-crowns and shillings, So he took her to all the charity sermons, and if by any extraordinary chance there wasn’t a charity sermon anywhere, he would drop a couple of sovereigns (one for him and one for her) into the poor-box at the door; And as he always deducted the sums thus given in charity from the housekeeping money, and the money he allowed her for her bonnets and frillings, She soon began to find that even charity, if you allow it to interfere with your personal luxuries, becomes an intolerable bore. On Sundays she was always melancholy and anything but good society, For that day in her household was a day of sighings and sobbings and wringing of hands and shaking of heads: She wouldn’t hear of a button being sewn on a glove, because it was a work neither of necessity nor of piety, And strictly prohibited her servants from amusing themselves, or indeed doing anything at all except dusting the drawing-rooms, cleaning the boots and shoes, cooking the parlour dinner, waiting generally on the family, and making the beds.