_Tickle._ Made o’ different things. Sometimes o’ steel-filings, sometimes o’ soap-and-water. But, as I say, Betsy Bermondsey has sweethearts; and the different parishes about her don’t send their churchwardens, some to speak for the butcher; some for the baker; some for the milkman; some for the police; and some for a cobbler that she’d never seen in all her days; and what’s worse, some from the cats’-meat man that she never looked at without shivering. No, Betsy gives away her heart, and is all the lighter and rosier for the gift. And she marries the baker, and in as quick a time as possible she’s in a little shop, with three precious babbies, selling penny rolls, and almost making ’em twopennies by the good nature she throws about ’em. _Nutts._ What do you say to that, Mrs Nutts? _Mrs Nutts._ Well, I should say Betsy were a happy woman. Every poor soul hasn’t her luck. _Tickle._ You may say that. For only think of Isabella, Queen of Spain. Poor little merino lamb! With half-a-dozen ’bassadors prowling about her, and licking their lips, like tigers about a sheep-pen, to snatch her up--and at last it’s done. At last she’s laid hold of, and her very heart’s torn out of her, that she may be made a wife of a ----. _Nosebag._ It makes a man’s blood bile to think of it. _Tickle._ And acause she’s a queen she’s to be turned into a horrid slave for life, and the link of the chain that holds her is to be a wedding-ring. Now, when some foreign prince’s grandmother’s aunt’s husband’s sister’s son or daughter dies, all the Courts go into mourning for three or four days or hours, I forget which, to show to this world and the next their respect for the calamity. Now it’s my opinion, if there was any real truth in Court mourning, that all the royal folks in Christendom ought to put on sackcloth, with a good sprinkling of the best Wallsend ashes, when Queen Isabella marries her cousin. Charming matrimony, when one of the parties, and that one the poor woman too, as the _Times_ says, recoils from the other “with loathing.” _Mrs Nutts._ Don’t talk of it, Mr Tickle, it’s more than my head can bear. _Slowgoe._ All very fine and very sentimental; but what’s to become of state affairs, if kings and queens think of their hearts? Hearts warn’t made for ’em. Royal folks have always married in one way, and therefore always must. It’s quite right there should have been all this dodging about Isabella’s husband. _Nutts._ Well, I haven’t said anything about the matter as yet; but after all, what a deal we men, as rational criturs of the universe--lords of the earth--angels in our worldly apprenticeship, as we think ourselves, have to brag about, when it’s made a matter of consequence to millions of rational souls _who_ a little gal of sixteen marries--whether one man or another! _Slowgoe._ None of your atheism, Mr Nutts; or, as I’ve told you a hundred times, you shan’t shave me. Politics is a mysterious thing.