“Friends! I never had anybody belonging to me but a faither,” said Lizzie, who understood relations to be signified by that word: “but I’m no heeding now; and I’ll soon learn to nip the ends off the words like the rest o’ them. There’s a grand green for drying, that Mrs. Goldsworthy calls the back ga’den; and, if you’ll no’ be angry, I can do the ironing grand mysel’.” “You! but I dare not trust you, Lizzie,” said I, shaking my head. “Mr. Langham would find it out--I mean he would find me out--if they were not quite so well done; and you don’t consider what quantities of things you will have to do--to keep the drawing-room nice, and get tea and breakfast, and wash, and I don’t know what; and yet always to be tidy, and keep baby all day long. You don’t know what you have on your hands already, you unlucky girl.” “Eh, I’m glad!” cried Lizzie, clapping her hands together with fervour; and her brown eyes sparkled, and her uncouth figure grew steady with the delight of conscious energy and power. If she had been eighteen she would not have been so simple-minded. Never anybody was so fortunate as I had been in my little maid. CHAPTER II. Very soon we began to get interested in the people round about us; for we were not here, as we had been in Mrs. Saltoun’s little house, the only strangers. By means of Lizzie, who was much annoyed at the discovery, I found out that the house was quite full of lodgers. On the ground floor there was a foreign gentleman and his servant. The gentleman was absent at first; but the man, a very fat, good-humoured-looking fellow, who adopted us all into his friendship immediately, and expanded into smiles through the railings of the stair when any of us went up or down, was in full possession. The way that Lizzie avoided this smiling ogre, and the way in which he appreciated her panic, and was amused by it, and conciliated and coaxed her, was the most amusing thing I ever saw. And the way he opened the door for me, and took off his hat, and laid his hand on his heart and bowed! The good fellow quite kept us in amusement. When baby, who was getting on famously and noticing everything, crowed at him, in spite of his great beard, as children _will_ do to men (it is very odd; but babies _do_ take to strange men sooner than to strange women, I believe), the fat foreigner burst into great shouts of delighted laughter, and snapped his fat fingers, and made the funniest grimaces to please the child. None of us could speak a single word of his language; we did not even know at first what countryman he was; but we all got to have the most friendly, kind feeling for the stranger,--all except Lizzie, who stumbled up and flew downstairs in her anxiety to avoid his eyes. One bad habit he certainly had; he smoked perpetually. He smoked cigars--shocking bad ones, Harry said: he did not even put them down when he sprang out of his parlour to open the door for me; but only withdrew the one he was