We are now in for a thoroughly comfortable and intimate conversation. The cat is fast asleep. The spinster's mantelpiece, which is decorated with pictorial advertisements of such highly inappropriate commodities as baby's food and tobacco, wears an aspect which I am content to regard as social. And the cupboard beside the fireplace, although the bottom floor is used as a coal-cellar, suggests, with its crowded shelves of dishes, egg-cups, plates, biscuit-boxes, and paper bags, that we are in for a little friendly banquet, which, if not good enough for his Grace of Canterbury, might yet have inspired him of Assisi to ask a blessing. * * * * * "Well, you must know," says Miss Stipp, looking at the fire, and nodding her head as she speaks, "that I am one of ten, that I was born in Blackfriars--born in Blackfriars, I was--and that all the boys died, and that only me, who was born a cripple--born a cripple, I was--and my two sisters ever grew up to be a comfort to my poor mother. What father was, if ever he was anythin' at all, I _don't_ know; and if I ever did know I think it was somethin' connected in some roundabout fashion, it was, with drains. But he died early, and that was an end of _him_. My poor mother, she was a laundress--a beautiful laundress she was, a very beautiful laundress--and she used to do for a gentleman who was a dissentin' minister--a dissentin' minister he was--and most particular about his linen, and lived in the big square just by the church at the corner, number five; and I've knowed my poor mother fret herself almost to death, she would, if one of them little blisters ever come up on the gentleman's shirt-fronts. And I used to help my poor mother, I did, by carryin' the gentleman's linen to number five in the big square, and that was the fust job I ever did for my poor mother, and proud she was, and proud I was, too, that I could be sich a help to her.