Reader, I do not wish to give you an inventory of an old furniture-shop, but merely some idea of the inextricable confusion in which this heterogeneous mass of worn out, broken, worm-eaten, mildewed, fly-stained, dust-clothed, cobweb-veiled items, were piled up from floor to ceiling. It would make your heart and head ache with wondering what sort of a living could be picked out from so much dirt, disorder and decay—and who on earth could be the patrons of the establishment. You would unconsciously gather close about you your most worthless dress in passing through the shop, and look up in involuntary dread of a broken head or limbs, by the fall of some of those dilapidated, ill-balanced, old chairs and tables. The family of the chair-maker consisted of himself, his wife, and two daughters. They were Germans, with the usual talent of that race for money-getting and money-keeping. And the man made at least a hundred per cent. on every old, rickety, worm-eaten bureau or table that, mended and varnished, left his shop. They added to their income, by letting the rooms of their house, and occasionally by taking a profitable boarder. It was in the early part of the same autumn which found her sister Carolyn in Lisbon—and Mrs. Clifton and Catherine alone at Hardbargain, that Zuleime became a tenant of the German cabinet-maker. She occupied the back room, on the second floor; the two daughters of the family using the front room as a sleeping apartment. She had the use of the street passage door, and so reached her room without passing through the shop or any part of the house occupied by the family or their boarders. The refinement in which she had been born and bred, was not lost amid her bitter poverty. It constrained her to seek privacy of life at least. She supported herself and child, just now, by doing fine needle-work for some ladies on a transient visit to the city. But the work was precarious, and the supply might be cut off at any moment. Her expenses were small, however, and her economy wonderful. Her neat, but poorly furnished room, cost her but ten shillings a month; a bushel of meal and a pint of salt, five shillings; milk for the child, two shillings; fuel, eight shillings; washing, three shillings; candle-light, two shillings; and the attendance of a boy to bring water and cut wood, three shillings—making the sum total of her monthly expenses only one pound, fourteen shillings, or little more than six dollars. Her only food was mush or corn-cakes prepared from the meal. She could not have kept up very long under this regimen; indeed, although she knew it not, she was slowly dying of a disease as common as lingering, and as universally ignored as that of a broken heart—namely, innutrition or slow starvation. Her German hostess, kind-hearted, notwithstanding her money grasping propensities, often sent her a bowl of “noodle soup,” with a little plate of “sour-krout,” and a tumbler of schnapps, or some such combination of German luxuries.