For more than a month I thought that Duffy was as single as the very Gloucester he had for cheese, and so I should have believed him to my dying day, had I not noticed that he not only seemed too attentive by half to his washerwoman--who afterwards turned out to be his draggle-tail hussey of a wife--but also that the bundles of dirty clothes he sent to the wash, were considerably more corpulent, than, from the usual filthy state of his linen, I should have been led to expect. And it wasn’t long before I found out the cause of it all; for one fine Monday morning, I happened to go into the pantry, and there lay the usual stout bundle of dirty linen, belonging to John Duffy, Esquire. When I opened it on the sly, I thought I should have fainted. There they were--very pretty indeed!--two pair of cotton stockings--one pair of cold fried soles--one cotton night-cap--half a raspberry jam tart--one day shirt--a large piece of a beef-steak pie--two dickies--six tallow candles--four white cravats--a hunk of cold bacon--one pair of drawers--and upon my honour, near upon half a hundred weight of coals stuffed inside of them. But the beauty of it was, that not content with robbing me of my meat and coals, and candles and things, the villain must set to work pilfering our wine as well; and whenever Mr. Sk--n--st--n told him to decanter a bottle of port, or even sherry, I declare if the fellow didn’t, while he stood at the sideboard with his back turned to us, fill a good sized physic bottle out of it every time, for his own private drinking. For a long time it struck me, that less wine went to the quart bottle than is usual even with wine-merchants; but I attributed this to the improvements which are going on in glass manufactories so rapidly, that bottles, apparently the same size as they used to be, are made, by some invisible arrangement at the bottom, to hold twice as little as they used to do; while they seem to be getting less and less so fast, that soon, instead of two pints making one quart, in wine and beer measure, as our schoolmasters foolishly taught us to believe, we shall find it just the very reverse; for shortly, the “Honourable Company of Free Vintners” will teach us that two quarts make one pint.