What I disliked most in the chit was his wicked deceit; for before Edward he was so meek and gentle that you would not have fancied that he could have said “Boh!” to a goose, and of course his master hadn’t got wit enough to see through the young Turk, but must be telling me, whenever I ventured to let fall a hint as to any of his tricks directly Edward was out of the house, that he never saw a better behaved lad in all his life, saying that I could not expect to have the head of a grey-beard on the shoulders of a hobbledehoy. And positively Mr. Sk--n--st--n was so taken with the artful, double-faced little brat that he must be continually giving him a penny now, and twopence then, as much as to say that he didn’t believe a word of what I had told him, and was trying to see how much he could encourage the imp in his goings on. Instead of putting all these halfpence in a money-box and saving it for his old age, the disgraceful young spendthrift put it in his money-box and only saved it to buy a trumpery little wooden theatre, and got that romantic Betsy to lend him some more to buy the whole of the scenes and characters of “THE MILLER AND HIS MEN,” so that he might act it on the kitchen dresser, while she sat in front, wasting her valuable time, as the audience. Often and often, when Edward’s been detained at chambers and I’ve been sitting alone by myself of a night waiting for him to come home, have I been almost knocked off my seat and frightened out of my wits, by hearing a report of firearms down in the kitchen, and, wondering what on earth could have happened, have rushed down stairs and found that it was only Master Wittals firing off his trumpery penny cannon, to make Miss Betsy believe that the Mill was blown up. And there I should find her clapping her hands, as the little pocket-handkerchief of a curtain came down in front of the grand transparency in the last scene, which the young monkey had got up without any regard to expense, as they say, by greasing it all over with my butter. When I came to turn it over in my mind, it seemed as if Fate did not think it sufficient to scourge me with that dreadful novel-reading plague of a Betsy, but must also go sending a still greater plague to me, in the shape of Wittals, to drive me fairly out of my wits. Though, now that I come to think of it, I can hardly say there was a pin to choose between them; for there were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, and both far too many for me. I’m sure of an evening, sometimes, I’ve nearly gone mad with the sound of that boy’s drawling voice, reading some highly-exciting romance, for all the world as if he were a parish clerk going over the two first lines of a psalm. There I could hear him droning away for hours, with his