The good Aunt felt that she had the more cause to be apprehensive in the latter direction, from some observations that she had accidentally made a few weeks before. Not long after the coming into the house of Miss Hetty, cook and kitchen girl, (she is certainly entitled to the prefix of "Miss," at least once, from the fact of her holding her head a little higher than any member of the family) a little after her advent, we say, Aunt Martha happened one evening to pass through the lower hall, in list slippers, and accidentally became aware that two persons were talking in a very low tone, just within the door of the dining-room. Perhaps it may have been accidentally, but possibly on purpose, that she took one glance through the crack of the door, herself unobserved, and noticed that the talkers were Judge Owen and Hetty. The tone was certainly confidential, and the two stood very near together. Had Mrs. Martha West not been aware of certain points in her brother's character which would make a criminal flirtation with a servant-girl in his own house impossible, she might have drawn the conclusion that some impropriety of that kind was on foot. As it was, she became satisfied that some of her previous suspicions were correct, and that Judge Owen, who habitually went to the intelligence-offices and selected the servants when any change became necessary, was capable of the ineffable meanness of bribing his domestics to play the spy on his own household and detail all the occurrences to him! Where the estimable man had picked up that particular meanness, she had no idea, nor is this a place in which to hazard a suggestion. If it was so, it might be suggested that the practice of hearing and allowing weight to spy testimony, caught through key-holes and the cracks of doors, or picked up by lounging at people's elbows on sidewalks and in bar-rooms, had possibly some connection with the application of the same system to his own household.