should like to know, instead of coming home always grumbling away, like an old Smellfungus as he is). Then of a morning, too, he had no sooner swallowed his breakfast, than he must go dancing down stairs, and stand fiddling for half an hour in the cellar, pretending to be getting his filthy wine out, though of course I knew what my gentleman was after, as well as he himself did, for up stairs he’d trot, with a face as long as my arm, with a whole pack of trumpery complaints, and, as pleased as Punch with the mare’s-nests that my Mr. Clever thought he had discovered. Then out they would come, one after another--first, why weren’t the blacking brushes in their proper place, instead of on the kitchen dresser?--or else, hadn’t he told me over and over again, that he wouldn’t have the servants’ candlesticks put into the fire?--or, why were the cinders all about the passage?--or else, he declared the stones were as black as his hat, and had never been cleaned for a twelvemonth,--in fact, the whole place was a perfect disgrace to me, and positively, he would go on fidgeting and knagging about this, that, and the other, until I lost all patience with him, and told him as plainly as I could, “that he had no business at all down in the kitchen, poking his nose into what didn’t concern him, and that all I wished to goodness gracious was, that the cook would pin a dishclout to his coat tails, and then, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to let him go down to the court at Westminster with it dangling at his heels, if it was only that the Lord Chief Justice of England might see what a mollycoddle and poking meddling thing he was”--and the beauty of it was, that I used to put him in such a passion by telling him that there was a party I knew, who was not a hundred miles from where I was standing, and who was one of the greatest fidgets that I ever came near, and saying in my most tantalising way, “Well, I wouldn’t be a fidget, no, not if anybody was to make me a present of all the gold in the mines of Peru that very moment.”