How on earth the horrid silly could ever have managed to pay for all the works she took in out of the wages I allowed her, and what in the name of goodness she could ever have thought was to become of her in her old age, it would, I’m sure, take a much wiser head than mine to say; for independently of being a constant subscriber from the commencement to most of the penny novels, I declare nothing would please her stuck-up literary ladyship but she must needs take in a newspaper of her own every week, and be a constant reader of the “Penny Sunday Times,” though what to gracious she could have seen in the thing, I can’t make out. Positively, it used to make me shudder all over, and the blood run quite cold down my back, to see the large, staring, frightful engraving that there was always in the middle of its front page. For as true as each Saturday came round, there was sure to be some great brute of a man, in a Spanish hat and a large black cloak all flying about, striking some very grand theatrical attitude, and flourishing over his head a big carving-knife, to which three or four heavy notes of admiration were hanging, while a poor defenceless woman lay at his feet, with her throat cut as wide open as a cheese, and weltering in a pool of ink; and the beauty of it was, the thing always had some grand title, like “THE EARL IN HIS JEALOUS RAGE SLAYING THE LADY ISOLINE.” Any one would naturally have fancied that the Penny Sunday Times and the novels at the same price would have been quite enough to have satisfied my lady’s love of the horrible; but, Lord bless you, no! I declare, there wasn’t a single murder or last dying speech and confession cried out in the streets, but she must rush up, all haste, to the door just to have another pen’orth of horrors; and then she would sit herself down, and never let the bit of paper go out of her hand until she had got the whole of the affecting copy of verses at the end of it by heart, and there I should have her marching about the house for weeks afterwards chanting some such nonsense as the following:-- “Biddle and Sheriff is our sad names, And do confess we were much to blame, On the 28th of September last, We well remember, alas! alas! The very thoughts causes us to rue, In Eighteen hundred and forty-two.”