"God bless all the kind ratepayers for my good dinner and a good cup o' tay to wash it down with, and a nice bit of fire this cold day. You paupers never give thanks unto the Lord, a nasty Protestant lot without a ha'porth of manners between you, a-cursing and swearing, and blaspheming; they have not the grace of God. Say 'Good afternoon' to the lady, Betsy Brown, and don't be so rude; they never do have a word of thanks to the kind ladies and gentlemen who come a-visiting them, and we don't get many visitors just now; all the dear ladies are away a-paddling in the ocean. The gentleman Guardians come sometimes, but they are not so chatty as the ladies, don't seem to know what to say to us old women. You don't happen to have a bit of snuff about you, my lady?--excuse me asking you, but some of the ladies carries a bit for me. I ain't allowed my pipe in here, and I misses it cruel; at first I had gripes a-seizing my vitals through missing the comfort of a bit of 'baccy, and the doctor he seemed much gratified with the symtims of my sufferings, and says I was attacked by the pensis, I think he termed it, the royal disease of the King, and he was all for cutting me up at once. But I up and says, 'Young man, don't talk to your elders. It's nothing but my poor hinnards a-craving for a pipe and a drop o' Irish, and you'll kindly keep your knives and hatchets off me. The King can be cut up if he likes, but I'll go before my Judge on the Resurrection morning with my poor old body undisfigured by gaping holes and wounds!' Yes, I frets cruel in the work'us, lady. If I could only get away back to Kensington, where I belong, I'd be all right. I have no friends here--only you and the Almighty God. I'm a poor old blind Irishwoman, lady; and my sons is out in Ameriky and seems to have forgotten the mother that bore them, and my husband's been dead these forty years, and he was not exakly one to thank God for on bare knees--God rest his poor black sowl! Yes, I've been blind now these thirty years (I was ninety on the Feast of the Blessed Lady of Mount Carmel), and one day in the winter we'd just been saying Mass for the sowl of the Cardinal Newman, and when I got back home I put up a bit of gunpowder to clane the chimbly, which smoked cruel (I always was a decent, clane body) and the wicked stuff turned round on me very vindictious, and blew down into the room, burning red-hot into my poor, innocent eyes. They cut one out at St. Bartholomew's 'Orspital, and they hoped to save the other, but it took to weeping itself away voluntarious, and a-throbbing like steam-engines, and the young chaps fetched it out a few weeks later. But I'm a very happy blind woman. Yes, lady, it was dreadful at first, and I'll not deny that the cross seemed too heavy for my poor back--as if God Himself had forsaken me--great, black, thundering darkness all round as I couldn't cut a peep-show in nohow. All night I'd be a raging