"Just come here, will you?" says a p'leeceman to me one day as I was a-sticking an "Alarming Sacrifice" against the wall, and a thinking to myself it was like the way we used to gammon the old hens at home, shamming to throw down barley, so that they'd come running and clucking like fun to find nought; while here was these rogues a-using me to scatter their barley about to bring all the old London hens a-clucking over their bargains in calicoes and dresses, bought at unheard-of prices, "in bankruptcy." "Just come in here a minute," says the policeman, and I leaves off at "Alarming Sac--;" and I daresay there was an alarming sack made out of the noodles, for that bill never got finished, but stopped there till another sticker went and stuck the "Christy's" over it. I follows my chap in, carrying my bills and crutches and paste, on account of the boys, and follows him right upstairs--up stairs as wern't safe--to a miserable attic, where there was a poor thing lying on a bed--at least on a few rags, and she dressed in rags herself. There was the rain pelting against the broken windows and making a puddle on the floor; the wind whistling down the chimney, where there was no grate, only a few bits or iron hoop resting on some bricks, but no fire; whilst the rest of the furniture, after the ricketty bedstead, was a little table, and a chair with the bottom sticking down like part of a fish basket. "Stop with her while I goes for help," says the p'leeceman, and I nodded, staring all the while at the poor thing on the bed; and as soon as he had gone, I goes a tiptoe to the winder, pulls a little bill out of my bag, lays on the paste, and pops it over one of the broken panes; and then does the same by two more, which was some improvement, you know, only when I looks on the first, if it wasn't in big letters, "Coffin!" for the "Dr" was tucked round outer sight one side, and the "s" and the "Pills" the other. "That won't do," I says, and I fetches out another bill from another parcel. Nice thing that for a sick woman to see as a transparency--"Coffin!" so I pastes the other bill and sets up, but snatches it down again directly, for it was "The Dead Letter," and there was only "The Dead" to be seen. But the next one did service, for it was "Good Words." "Ah!" I says, she wants some bad enough, and then I spoke and said something or another, but there was no answer; so thinking it best, I waited quietly till the p'leeceman came back, when he whispered to me as they were going to take her in a cab to the House. "House? What house?" somebody cries all at once in a horrid cracked, hoarse voice, "No--no--no--no!" And there, sitting up in the bed, with her blue bony fingers stretched out, and her dull eyes straining, the poor thing kept motioning the p'leeceman away, and no one tried to touch her.