"Oh, mum, the sufferins as I went through in that noo willa was dreadful. The kidgin fire smoked to that degree that the blacks used to be a-flying about all over the kidgin, and a-settling on everything, though if there's one place as a black will settle on it's your nose, when fust time you give it a rub there you are not fit to be seen; while the water was that hard it was no use to rub or wash. Soap was nowhere; and I declare to you, mum, sollumly, as I've often washed the smuts off one side of my face on to the other, and took to black caps outer self-defence. "If it hadn't ha' been for the least drop o' g--took inwardly now and then, I should ha' been a blackened corpse over and over again, for that fire nearly drove me mad. Cinders will come out into your pan sometimes, and frizzle and make a smell of hot fat all over the house, and it's no use for ladies to make a fuss about it, for where cooking's going on you must smell it sometimes if you wants to taste it, and you'd be hard-up without your cook. But when the wind sets right down the chimbley and blows all the smoke wrong way into your face, and making you sneeze, filling your eyes up, and driving the blacks into custard or veal cutlets, or whatever you're a-making of, who can help it? And then they says upstairs as the things tastes bitter. "`You must have it stopped, mum,' I says to the missus, but she says as the place has cost 'em five hundred pound now more than the contrack, and so I says to myself, `As it's for your good, and you won't be led, you must be drove.' So only outer self-defence I kep a black fire, and left the kidgin door open, when the blacks all went up the stairs, and a man came down nex week to take my measure for a patent prize kidginer. "But then, mum, if you'll believe me, it wasn't only in the kidgin, it was all over the house, which was designed by the artchyteck to hold so much wind that it went wentilating about the place and banging the doors to that degree that if you didn't make haste you were hit on the back and nearly sent flat. Jane had such a stiff neck--not as that was anything new, for the baker said she was the stuckuppist gal he ever did see; but this was a cold stiff neck, and had to be rubbed with 'deldoc, and slep in flannel every night, so as she was a good half-hour undressing, and then got into bed with such cold feet as would have made a saint swear. "`Jane,' says I, one night, `if you don't sleep in your stockings I shall be obliged to have a bottle.' "`Of g--,' she says, in her nasty, aggravating, spiteful way. "`No imperance;' I says, `a bottle of hot water, wrapped up in a flannel--a-hem--or I shall be having spazzums to that degree as I must have a drop of g--took inward, to save me from sufferin' as would make any one shudder.'