She was by no means an ill-looking woman. Dibble in his cups had told his friends that she was a regular beauty when first he knew her, as fair as waxwork, sir. But her tongue; well it was a caution, Mrs. Dibble’s tongue, and she had a sort of intermittent lisp, which instead of being an impediment in any way to the rapidity of her utterances only seemed to facilitate them, enabling her to slip and slide over an argument and abbreviate long words until her hearers might sometimes imagine she was pouring out a series of compound syllables in some unknown tongue. But that was only when she was in a passion, thank goodness, which did not occur more than once a week. Dibble himself was a mild little fellow as a rule, and a profound admirer of Mrs. D.’s accomplishments. She had learnt to play the piano when she was at school in her youth; and when she sat down to a five-and-a-half octave square of Broadwood’s on Sunday nights in her black satin dress, Dibble would sit by the fire and feast his eyes upon her with unsophisticated delight. It was not a very symmetrical figure neither, Mrs. Dibble’s, as you viewed it at the piano, and the two hooks-and-eyes which were undone near the middle of her back did not make it any the more elegant. Mrs. Dibble usually thumped at the Old Hundredth and a wonderful variation of “Vital Spark,” until her cap fell off and her hair came down, when she would close the “box of music” and utter twenty voluble regrets that she had so few opportunities of practising and keeping up her fingering. But Mr. Dibble did not agree with her on this point; it was the only one he was permitted to dispute; he vowed she played as well as if she had no end of practice. “You be fit for a concert,” he would say, “that you be.” Not that Thomas Dibble exactly knew what a concert was, never having been present at anything of the kind, except on the occasion of a _soirée_ at Gloucester when he went to a Sunday school there. Dibble was bred and born in Gloucestershire, and had risen from a kitchen menial to a place in the household at Barton Hall two counties off, whither he had been recommended by a clergyman of the cathedral city. He was not in Mr. Tallant’s service more than a year before he was promoted to the portership at Westminster. The Barton housekeeper gave him an introduction to a relative of hers, Miss Wilhelmina Stikes, of Still Street, and after a few visits to that buxom spinster, Miss Stikes made love to Thomas, proposed to him, and married him in less than three months. They had now been united some twenty years, and on the whole Mr. Dibble did not regret his bondage. He had always been accustomed to servitude; so the yoke of the fair-fat-and-loquacious Miss Stikes was not difficult to the patient and forbearing Thomas Dibble.