As we turned to leave the room I glanced around it. The windows were down, the shutters closed, but by the light which came through the broken slats and cheap lace curtains, whose ends were spread expansively on the bare floor, I saw its furnishings. A bed, covered with a white spread and with pillow-shams embroidered in red cotton, was against the side of the wall facing the windows, and close to it was a table on which lay a switch of coarse black hair. A crepe-paper lambrequin decorated the mantel-shelf, whose ornaments were a cup and saucer, a shaving-set, and a pair of conch-shells; while between the windows was a wash-stand obviously kept for ornamental purposes, as there was no water in the pitcher and the basin was cracked. Pinned on the soft plastering of the walls were florid advertisements of various necessities and luxuries of life, together with highly colored Scripture texts, and over the mantel hung a crayon of the once head of the house. The room was cold and damp. The air in it had not been changed for some time, and as Mrs. Gibbons stopped and picked up the baby, who at the sound of voices had crawled into the room, I did not wonder at its croupy cough. Down the dark and narrow passageway Bettina and I followed our hostess, and at its end I would have stumbled over a step had I not been warned in time. The noise made by a box overturned by Bettina gave the latter opportunity to give me one more injunction. "Don't promise to do too much right off." The whisper was uncomfortably clear. "She's the kind who's like a sifter. You have to be right hard with people like that-- Take care! There's another step!" CHAPTER VIII As we entered the kitchen, a tiny room with one window in it, I glanced around it as I had done at the front room, the two seeming to complete the suite occupied by Mrs. Gibbons. My survey was quick and cautious, but not too much so for mental noting of the conservation of time and space and labor represented by an arrangement of household effects I had never seen before. Health and comfort were the principal omissions. In one corner of the room was a bed covered with a calico quilt of many colors, and under it a pallet, tucked away for convenience in the daytime, but obviously out at night. Close to the bed was a large stove in which a good fire was burning, and from the blue-and-white saucepan on the top came forth odor of a soup with which I was not familiar. The door of the oven was partly open, and in the latter could be seen a pan of heavy-looking biscuits which apparently awaited their devouring at any time that suited the desire of the devourer. Bettina looked at them and then at me, but she said nothing--that is, nothing out loud.