When that precious beauty of a Mr. Edward came home that evening, I wasn’t going to be such a stupid as to let the capital discovery I had made drop in a minute; so all dinnertime I went on apologizing that I had got none of the _oyster patties_ for him, which he seemed so partial to; and asking him whether they allowed such delicacies in the _workhouse_ he was going to in such a hurry, and saying a whole troop of other nice tantalizing, knagging things, until I made him so wild, that he went on in such a way, and said such unwarrantable things to me, and kept on vowing that I should _not_ have the footman I wanted, in such a frightful manner, that at last bang went the door to again, and up stairs I bounced to bed, saying, “I’ll soon let you see whether I’ll have the footman or not, my fine Turk; for if I’m not as ill as ill can be, until I have a man-servant safe in the house, why my name’s not Sk--n--st--n.” All that night through I had the spasms so bad, that I took good care Mr. Edward didn’t have a wink of sleep; and next morning, just as he was shaving himself, and promising, that if I wanted an extra servant, I might have a parlour-maid (like his impudence, indeed!) I had such a violent attack of hysterics, that any one, to have heard my screams, (and I’m sure they must have been audible at least a hundred villas off,) would have thought that Mr. Sk--n--st--n was ill-treating me. Just before he went down stairs, I called him to the bedside, and told him I was convinced I had got violent Neuralgia--brought on by my over-exertions about the house, and most likely I should never entirely get rid of it to my dying day. “Do you feel in pain, then, my love?” he said. “Where is it? Tell me, my duck.” “Of course I did,” I answered; and throwing up the whites of my eyes, and biting my lip, as if in great agony, I begged him, “Not to duck me, as he was the cause of it all, and that he might thank his stars that his ill-treatment hadn’t so completely shattered my nerves as to have brought on St. Vitus’s dance,”--and so it certainly would, only, to tell the reader the truth, I didn’t know the step of that most frightful of all dances; and I recollect when my aunt R--msb--tt--m had it very severely, it seemed to me much more difficult to manage than the double-shuffle in the College Hornpipe, so that as for keeping _that_ up all about the house for a whole week, why it was more than I chose to do.