The anticipations of the enthusiastic lover again began to fall, and in five minutes his heart, which so lately was “burning with high hope,” was so cold as to be uncomfortable. On a seven-by-nine cooking-stove, which three pints of coal would have driven blazing crazy, stood a diminutive iron kettle, in which something was noisily stewing; the something may have been a decoction of magic herbs, or it may have been Madame Widger’s dinner. A tumble-down trunk in a corner of the room did precarious duty for a chair; a faded carpet hid the floor; a cheap rocking-chair in the act of moulting its upholstery spread its luxurious arms invitingly near the dim window; and a table, on which a pack of German playing cards was coyly half concealed by a newspaper, a coal-hod, and a poker, completed the necessary furnishing of the apartment. The ornaments are soon inventoried; a certificate of membership of the New York State Agricultural Society, given at Albany to Mr. M. G. Bivins, hung in a cheap frame over the table. The other decorations were a few prints of high-colored saints, an engraving of a purple Virgin Mary with a pea-green child, and a picture of a blue Joseph being sold by yellow brethren to a crowd of scarlet merchants who were paying for him with money that looked like peppermint lozenges. Madame Widger, the “Mysterious Spanish Lady,” was not at first visible to the naked eye, but a loud, shrill, vicious voice, which made itself heard through the partition dividing the reception-room from some apartment as yet unexplored by them, directed the attention of her visitors to her exact locality. She was “engaged” with another gentleman, said the knight of the ragged inexpressibles. Had not what he had already seen of the mansion decidedly cooled the passion of the love-lorn customer, this intelligence would have been likely to rouse his ire against the interloping swain, and make him pant for vengeance and fistic damages to the other party; but in his present confused state of mind he received this blow with philosophic indifference. The old man subsided into a chair, and in a weak sort of way began to talk, evidently with some insane idea of pleasingly filling up the time until the prophetess should be disengaged. His conversation seemed to run to disasters, with a particular partiality to shipwrecks. He accordingly detailed, with wonderful exactness, the perils encountered by a certain canal-boat of his, “loaded principally with butter and cheese,” during a dangerous voyage from Albany to New York, and which was finally brought safely to a secure harbor by the power of the Widger, which circumstance had made him her slave for life.