However, I must leave my gooseberry pudding for awhile, and return to that sentimental novel-reading creature of a Betsy, of whom I spoke in my last chapter. There was a nice bit of goods for a well regulated establishment like mine! How people can ever bring their minds to give characters to such idle, good-for-nothing affected toads, is a mystery to me, and from the character I had with her, I’m sure I expected that she would have proved nothing less than the treasure I had been on the constant look out for ever since I was married. Lord-a’-mercy upon the woman, I don’t suppose there ever was (or ever will be again, let us hope) another creature like her. I declare, unless you kept her right under your nose all day long, there was no getting her to do a single thing properly; for positively she was so wrapt up in her romances, that directly my eye was off her, she was sure to pull the “HEADS OF THE HEADLESS” out of her pocket, or else spread out “MARIANNE THE CHILD OF CHARITY,” right before her on the kitchen dresser, and no matter what she was at, there she would go rubbing and reading and snivelling away, paying a great deal more attention to her trumpery pennyworth of “soul-stirring interest,” than to my work. I’m sure that to have made her perfectly happy, all she wanted was to have been allowed to scrub down the stairs, with a reading-desk set up before her, or else to stick some highly exciting nautico-domestic rubbish at the top of her broom, and read while she swept--in the same way as the military bands stick their music on their hautboys and things, so that they may play while they march. For, upon my word, often and often have I, after ringing two or three times for the sentimental cat, gone down in the kitchen, and found her with a snuff to the candle as big as a toad-stool, and all of a tremble like an Italian greyhound, over the “CASTLE FIEND, or _the Fate of the Loved and the Lost, and the Ten Mysteries_,” or some other powerfully-written nonsense; and if in my vexation I snatched it from her hand, I was sure to find that, instead of minding the needle-work I had given her, she had been wasting the whole of her evening with such stuff as this: “Hush! some one comes,” said the Baron Mavaracordo to Canoni--a man of strange aspect and apparel--as they were seated in a richly decorated room in Strademoor Castle. “My lord,” said a man-at-arms, “there come three travellers through the storm, and demand admittance to the castle.” “Do they proclaim their calling and degree?” “They do not; but in the name of hospitality as wanderers, they demand admittance. One is a female, but they are well mounted; and one looks warlike, although clad not in the garments of a knight.” (Clad not! Pretty talk that for a common soldier--of the dark ages, too.) “Admit them; and, with all imaginable speed, show them to the painted closet. I will see them there.”