I can write no more: I have done great violence to myself in writing so much. Further specimens of the daily outrages inflicted on me by my next-door neighbour (though I could add them by dozens) could do but little more to illustrate the intolerable nature of the grievance of which I complain. Although Lady Malkinshaw's naturally fine sense of justice suffered me to call and remonstrate the day after she left my house; although we are now faster friends than ever, how can I expect her ladyship to visit me again, after the reiterated insults to which she was exposed on the last occasion of her esteemed presence under my roof? How can I ask my niece--a young person who has been most carefully brought up--to come and stay with me, when I know that she will be taken into the major's closest domestic confidence on the first morning of her arrival, whether she likes it or not? Of all the dreary prospects, stretching before all the single ladies in the world, mine seems the most hopeless. My neighbours can't help me, and I can't help myself. The law of the land contains no provision against the habitual management of a wife and family in a front garden. Private remonstrance addressed to a man so densely impenetrable to a sense of propriety as the major, would only expose me to ridicule, and perhaps to insult. I can't leave my house, for it exactly suits me, and I have bought it. The major can't leave his house, for it exactly suits him, and he has bought it. There is actually no remedy possible but the forcible removal of my military neighbour from his home; and there is but one power in the country which is strong enough to accomplish that removal--the Horse Guards, infuriated by the horrors of war. CASES WORTH LOOKING AT.--II. THE POISONED MEAL. [From The Records of the French Courts.] CHAPTER I. THE POCKETS. This case takes us across the Channel to Normandy; and introduces us to a young French girl, named Marie-Françoise-Victoire Salmon. Her father was a poor Norman labourer. Her mother died while she was a child. From an early age Marie had learnt to get her own living by going out to service. Three different mistresses tried her while she was a very young girl, and found every reason to be satisfied with her conduct. She entered her fourth place, in the family of one Monsieur Dumesnil, when she was twenty years of age. This was the turning-point in her career; and here the strange story of her life properly begins.