well,” said I, “have a little patience, and at my return, I’ll try if I can put things in better order. But in the meantime, what business have you here?” Her reverence upon this was a little qualified, and told me that she had now been eight hundred years in hell, upon a design to erect an order of the gouvernantes; but the right worshipful the devil-commissioners are not as yet come to any resolution upon the point. For say they, if your gouvernantes should come once to settle here, there would need no other tormentors, and we should be but so many Jacks out of office. And besides, we should be perpetually at daggers-drawing about the brands and candle-ends which they would still be filching, and laying out of the way; and for us to have our fuel to seek, would be very inconvenient. “I have been in purgatory too,” she said, “upon the same project, but there so soon as ever they set eye on me, all the souls cried out unanimously, _libera nos_, etc. As for heaven, that’s no place for quarrels, slanders, disquiets, heart-burnings, and consequently none for me. The dead are none of my friends neither, for they grumble, and bid me let them alone as they do me; and be gone into the world again if I please, and there (they tell me) I may play the gouvernante _in sæcula sæculorum_. But truly I had rather be here at my ease than spend my life crumpling, and brooding over a carpet at a bed-side, like a thing of clouts, to secure the poultry of the family from strange cocks, which would now and then have a brush with a virgin pullet, but for the care of the gouvernantes. And yet ’tis she, good woman, bears all the blame, in case of any miscarriage: the gouvernante was presently of the plot, she had a feeling in the cause, a finger in the pie. And ’tis she in fine that must answer for all. Let but a sock, an old handkercher, the greasy lining of a masque, or any such frippery piece of business be missing, ask the gouvernante for this, or for that. And in short, they take us certainly for so many storks and ducks, to gather up all the filth about the house. The servants look upon us as spies and tell-tales: my cousin forsooth, and t’other’s aunt dares not come to the house, for fear of the gouvernante. And indeed I have made many of them cross themselves, that took me for a ghost. Our masters they curse us too for embroiling the family. So that I have rather chosen to take up here, betwixt the dead and the living, than to return again to my charge of a Doüegna, the very sound of the name being more terrible than a gibbet. As appears by one that was lately travelling from Madrid to Vailladolid, and asking where he might lodge that night. Answer was made at a small village called Doüegnas. ‘But is there no other place,’ quoth he, ‘within some reasonable distance, either short or beyond it?’ They told him no, unless it were at a gallows. ‘That shall be my quarter then,’ quoth he,