When Miss Betsy had gone, and I had let down the night-bolt--I declare I had been dawdling about so long in the cold, that I was quite frightened lest I should have taken another chill--putting out the candle, I jumped into bed as quick as ever I could. And then, oh lud-a’-mercy me! what a pretty pickle it was in, to be sure. If the linen sheets weren’t positively just like sheets of water, and the whole bed as wet as the bed of the River Thames. I tumbled out again like lightning, as any one may easily imagine, when, drat it! if all my night clothes weren’t as wet and cold as a dog’s nose, and the worst of it was, they would keep clinging to me as if they were so much wet blotting-paper. I rushed to the bell, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled away, until Mr. Sk--n--st--n must have thought either that I had set the house on fire, or overlaid my dear little lamb, or found a brute of a man under the bed; for up he came, gasping away, crying out, “What on earth is the matter, Caroline?” and five minutes afterwards, up Miss Betsy sauntered, as leisurely as if nothing at all had happened. “The matter,” I cried, pulling off the bed-clothes, and throwing aside the sheet, that was so wet you might have wrung it--“Look here,” I said, holding up the soaking blanket; and which, when I let it go, I declare, fell with a flop upon the ground, for all the world as if it had been a batter-pudding--“And look here, too,” I cried, showing him the feather-bed tick, which really looked as dark as a slate with the wet--“Just come and feel it yourself, and say if it isn’t like a sponge, and then ask yourself how you’ll like to sleep upon it all night, for sleep upon it you must, as there isn’t another in the house. What’s more, too, these are the only sheets that you can have to lie upon to-night, for, thanks to that Miss Betsy there, she must not only think fit to give away all the clean ones I had home from the wash this very day, to the first person that chose to come and ask for them, but to make the thing complete, she must needs go burning a hole in the hot water warming-pan, and drenching my only remaining pair; and just because she knew I had caught a severe cold, and wanted a comfortable warm bed to set me right again. Oh, you wicked, abominable, novel-reading hussy you! you’ll be the death of me before you’ve done with me, you will! How you can have the impudence to stand there and look me in the face, and not expect the floor to open and swallow you up for your shameful goings on--and how _you_, too, Mr. Edward,” I continued, turning to Mr. Sk--n--st--n, “how you can stand there, as quiet as a common cab-horse, and see your poor wife worried into her grave in this way by that wicked woman, and not send her about her business this very moment, is beyond my limited powers to comprehend.”