I told Edward to go down stairs with the man that very moment, and make our treasure of a footman get up and see whether the spoons and forks were all right. He couldn’t have been gone five minutes, when back Mr. Sk--n--st--n came, tearing up stairs, in a towering passion, with the gratifying information that my treasure of a footman, who had stipulated to go to church, at least twice every Sunday, and lived for the last eighteen years with one of the bishops of the land, had gone off with the [Illustration: “_Do you know as your street-door is open?_”] whole of our silver plate, and left nothing but that bilious-looking “British” behind him. Of course, Mr. Edward made out that it was all _my_ fault, and would have it that if I’d had a grain of sense in my head, I might have seen that the character was false, and the bishop’s lady a common impostor--as, indeed, her reverend ladyship turned out. For when I went after her the next day, to give it her well, I learnt that she, too, had decamped from her lodgings the very same night as her inestimable treasure of a Thompson, without paying the week’s rent, and leaving nothing behind her but an empty rouge pot, and a hair trunk full of brickbats. I needn’t tell the reader, I suppose, that I never heard the last of this; and positively, I was no sooner out of one scrape than, with so many bothering servants about one, I was into another. You see everybody worth speaking of had left town for the season, and as I wouldn’t for the world have had it thought that I hadn’t gone for a trip on the Continent, I was forced, owing to Mr. Edward’s stinginess, and continual declarations that he was being ruined, to paper up the drawing-room blinds, and shut up all the shutters in front, to make believe that I was either at Paris, or Margate; while all the while I was living at the back of the house, very nearly in the dark, and like a vegetable had grown so white from mere want of light, that, positively, my face had no more colour in it than a potatoe-shoot in a coal-cellar. So, as my fine gentleman was taking his pleasure at the Warwick Assizes, and wouldn’t give me his consent to leave London, why I started off one fine morning without it, sending a letter for Mr. Edward, telling him that I had gone down to Gravesend, and leaving word with the servants, that I had gone up the Rhine. Then, packing up my carpet-bag and bonnet-box, and luckily catching the “Father of the Thames” at Hungerford-market, I jumped on it, and was soon at the end of my voyage. But Mr. Edward--just like his mean spite--wouldn’t send me the money I had written to him for; consequently, as lodgings were so high, and those filthy, gassy shrimps so dear, and the donkey-boys so extortionate, and I’d had enough of tea-parties at that stupid Windmill Hill, and was tired of those twopenny-halfpenny fêtes at Rosherville Gardens, and the housekeeping money I had brought with me was nearly