take advantage of my generosity; but, like a stupid, I must go overdoing it, for the more she kept refusing, the more I kept pressing, and when she protested “she wouldn’t listen to such a thing for a moment,” I (just for the look of the thing) directly declared that I would insist upon doing it, whereupon, drat it, if her ladyship wasn’t shabby enough to say, “Well, then, if you _insist_ upon it, my dear, I suppose I must give way,” and scampered off into the house, leaving me with that shameful impostor of a cabman, who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than eighteenpence. Augh! it isn’t the trumpery one-and-sixpence that I grumble about, but the nasty mean spirit in which I was left to pay it. Thank goodness, _I_ couldn’t be guilty of such meanness--no, not if I was to die for it to-morrow; but then, you know, some people are so different to others. Well, after I had sat for a minute, twiddling my thumbs in Mrs. L--ckl--y’s front parlour, I said, that as it seemed to be holding up a little, I thought that if she would be kind enough to lend me an umbrella, I should be able to get as far as our house without much inconvenience. So I had my umbrella, and off I started; but then, bother take the thing! it was one of those thin wiry Germans, with ribs no thicker than bodkins, and as the wind was rather high, I declare if, at the very first turning I came to, the trumpery bit of goods didn’t turn right inside out, and do what I would, I could neither get it down nor back again into its proper shape, and there was I obliged to go stalking all up Albany-street, holding up the inverted thing, looking like a great big funnel, and which, instead of keeping the rain off me, of course only served to collect all the water over my head like a cistern, which, being full of holes, of course it let through again, just like a shower-bath, and while I kept continually looking up to see where the dickens all the water that was pouring down upon me could come from, I kept stepping into all kinds of puddles, right up to the cotton tops of my white silk stockings, so that by the time I got home, I was positively soaking, and all my hair and things hung about me, for all the world like the feathers of the cocks and hens on a rainy day. As soon as I got up-stairs in the bed-room, I rang for Betsy, and asked her if they’d brought the clean things home from the wash, for I thought I’d better put on my clean morning wrapper. “Oh, yes, mum,” she answered; “they brought them an hour or two ago.” “Then just bring them up-stairs to me, there’s a good girl,” I replied. “If you please, mum,” she returned, “a man called immediately after they’d brought them, and said that the wrong basket had been left by mistake, and took it away, saying he would bring ours in a minute or two.”