When the man-at-arms had left to perform his errand, the baron turned to his companion, and said,-- “It is they.”[B] It is they!--_is it_ they indeed? There’s soul-stirring interest for you, all about your grand Baron Mavaracordo’s, who can’t speak even good grammar, and Italian gentlemen of astrological skill, who declare, that “if by the occult sciences that are familiar to them they can only find the knave who threw this here, he should suffer such pangs he dreams not of.”[C] And, bless your heart, she hadn’t been in the house a week or so before, I declare to goodness, I don’t think there was a saucepan in the place that hadn’t its bottom burnt out; for there she would let, no matter what it was, boil and boil away till there wasn’t a drop of water left; for what did _she_ care about the fish or the potatoes so long as she could have a quiet half-hour’s cry over the “BLACK PIRATE,” or else be finding out what became of “MARY, THE PRIMROSE GIRL,” instead of looking after my greens. It’s a perfect miracle to me, too, that we were not all of us burnt in our beds; for when she found that I was one too many for her, and kept throwing her “HEIRESSES OF SACKVILLE” and her “CHILDREN OF TWO FATHERS” behind the fire as fast as she got them, then she must needs go reading in her room half the night through, and smuggling either “THE GIPSY BOY,” or else “THE MANIAC FATHER, _or the Victim of Seduction_,” up to-bed with her of a night, robbing herself of her proper rest and me of my candles; and even when I took care to see that she had only an end just long enough to light her into bed, why then, drat her impudence, if the nasty toad didn’t burn all the kitchen stuff she could lay her hands upon in the butter-boat, with an old lamp wick stuck up in the middle.