I sat through this recital with cheeks that burned uncomfortably; nor was I the less embarrassed, on raising my eyes, to meet Mrs. Brown's fixed curiously and mischievously on mine. As soon as I could make my escape from the table, I did so, and, running rapidly up stairs, sought refuge from any possible inquiry in my own room. Baby was still asleep in the corner. It would not be safe to remove him until the lodgers had gone down town; and I was revolving in my mind the expediency of keeping him until night veiled his obtrusive eccentricity from the public eye, when there came a cautious tap at my door. I opened it. Mrs. Brown slipped in quietly, closed the door softly, stood with her back against it, and her hand on the knob, and beckoned me mysteriously towards her. Then she asked in a low voice,-- “Is hair-dye poisonous?” I was too confounded to speak. “Oh, do! you know what I mean,” she said impatiently. “This stuff.” She produced suddenly from behind her a bottle with a Greek label so long as to run two or three times spirally around it from top to bottom. “He says it isn't a dye: it's a vegetable preparation, for invigorating”-- “Who says?” I asked despairingly. “Why, Mr. Parker, of course!” said Mrs. Brown severely, with the air of having repeated the name a great many times,--“the old gentleman in the room above. The simple question I want to ask,” she continued with the calm manner of one who has just convicted another of gross ambiguity of language, “is only this: If some of this stuff were put in a saucer, and left carelessly on the table, and a child, or a baby, or a cat, or any young animal, should come in at the window, and drink it up,--a whole saucer full,--because it had a sweet taste, would it be likely to hurt them?” I cast an anxious glance at Baby, sleeping peacefully in the corner, and a very grateful one at Mrs. Brown, and said I didn't think it would. “Because,” said Mrs. Brown loftily as she opened the door, “I thought, if it was poisonous, remedies might be used in time. Because,” she added suddenly, abandoning her lofty manner, and wildly rushing to the corner with a frantic embrace of the unconscious Baby, “because, if any nasty stuff should turn its booful hair a horrid green, or a naughty pink, it would break its own muzzer's heart, it would!” But, before I could assure Mrs. Brown of the inefficiency of hair-dye as an internal application, she had darted from the room. That night, with the secrecy of defaulters, Baby and I decamped from Mrs. Brown's. Distrusting the too emotional nature of that noble animal, the horse, I had recourse to a handcart, drawn by a stout Irishman, to convey my charge to the ferry. Even then, Baby refused to go, unless I walked by the cart, and at times rode in it. “I wish,” said Mrs. Brown, as she stood by the door, wrapped in an immense shawl, and saw us depart, “I wish it looked less solemn,--less like a pauper's funeral.”