As she had spoilt the lamb for me, of course I had made little or no dinner, and, let alone my being as hungry as a hunter, I was positively dying to taste my favourite pudding for the first time that year, so that it wasn’t until I had put a large dessert-spoonful into my mouth, that I found out what the minx had been doing. And then, Uch! oh la! of all the messes, I thought I should have fainted! Taken the roughness off, indeed--ay, that she had, with a vengeance. Upon my word I was so vexed, I could have set down and had a good cry, I could; but as it was, I merely said to the jade,--“I’ll make you pay soundly for this, you may depend upon it, Miss Betsy; for if I don’t have another gooseberry pudding out of your next quarter, my name isn’t what it is; and I can tell you this, my fine lady, that if you don’t mind your P’s and Q’s, you’ll find that those trumpery soul-thrilling novels of yours will bring you to a bad end some of these fine mornings, take my word for it.” Oh! if I’d had my wits about me, and only been able to see my true interests, I should have had none of the stupid scruples of conscience that I had, and have got rid of the girl on the spot--only, thanks to Mr. Edward, he must have it that I was only happy when I was changing, when he knows that all I pray for is that I could get hold of some good, honest, hard-working maid, that would live and die in my service. As for Miss Betsy, she was quite a hopeless job. Upon my word she was so wrapt up in her works of fiction, that really she would believe any trumpery cock-and-a-bull story that was told her. There really was no trusting her out of my sight, and that’s the truth. Once I went out just to get a mouthful of fresh air in the Park, and on my return found that the hall had been stripped, and the gold watch of Edward’s poor dear first wife, which he had given me before we were married, had been carried off the mantelpiece by a fellow, whom she would have was the clergyman of the parish, and who, she said, requested to be allowed to write a letter to me about the Easter offering. If, too, by any accident I let the key of the area-gate out of my possession for more than a minute, she was certain to have down in the kitchen the first gipsy woman, with her trumpery box of sewing cottons to sell, that she could lay hold of, just to tell her rubbishing fortune, and who, after stuffing her head that she saw by the lines in her great ugly, coarse hand, that she was to marry a certain black-eyed young baker, and was to have her nine children and a shay-cart, and promising her, moreover, a large fortune into the bargain, would be certain to wind up by walking off with my silver spoons. The beauty of it was, too, that when I used to rate the romantic idiot soundly for her disgusting simplicity, telling her that she ought to be whipped at the cart’s tail for encouraging a pack of thieves in the way she did, upon my word if she wouldn’t, with all the