Edward flew into a tremendous passion, and rushed up to her room, where he thundered at the door so that I thought he would have broken it off its hinges, telling the lazy thing to get up and leave his house that very instant. As soon as she came down, Edward, being determined to see the creature clear off the premises, before he left for business, went and got her trunk and band-box himself, and paying her her wages up to the very day, bundled her into the street, things and all, where the brazen-faced hussy stopped ringing at the bell, and declaring that she would summon us if she did not receive a month’s warning; until she collected quite a crowd all round the house, and kept telling them in a loud voice, so that all the neighbours could hear, that I had behaved to her worse than a slave-driver would--and that she had been half-starved--and forced to live on sprats, (as I’m a living woman, she’d only had them once!) and that I took a delight in making her tipsy, (which the courteous reader knows to be a wicked falsehood,) and that we either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay her her wages. Nor did she cease her abuse, until Edward got the policemen to make her move on; which she did, vowing that she would have it all out before the magistrate, and make us suffer for it. So that there was I in a pretty state, indeed, left without a servant, and obliged to have a charwoman in until that wild Irish cat--whom I, in my blessed innocence, fancied to be a Cornwall woman--was ready to come into the house, (I wish to goodness gracious, from the bottom of my heart, that I had never seen the face of the fury,) and I hardly know, I’m sure, how I shall be able to wait a whole month before telling the reader all about the shameful way in which she went on towards me--and how I really thought the vixen would have had my life before she had done with me. CHAPTER V. OF THE PRETTY STATE I WAS IN INDEED AFTER MARY LEFT ME. “Oh, Mary, dear Mary, how lonely and drear The scenes now ungrac’d by thy presence appear! Each hall in my dwelling I fondly explore, And list for thy footstep, but hear it no more. Oh Mary, dear Mary!” “DEAR MARY.”