After running on in this way for some time, Mr. Swiveller
softly opened the office door, with the intention of darting
across the street for a glass of the mild porter. At that
moment he caught a parting glimpse of the brown head-
dress of Miss Brass flitting down the kitchen stairs. "And
by Jove!" thought Dick, "she's going to feed the servant.
Now or never!"

First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-
dress to disappear in the darkness below, he groped his
way down, and arrived at the door of a back kitchen im-
mediately after Miss Brass had entered the same, bearing
in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a very dark
miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls dis-
figured by a thousand rents and blotches. The water was
trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was
lapping up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starva-
tion. The grate, which was a wide one, was wound and
screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a little thin
sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-
cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all
padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have
lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place
would have killed a chameleon. He would have known at
the first mouthful that the air was not eatable, and must
have given up the ghost in despair.--The small servant
stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and hung
her head.

"Are you there?" said Miss Sally.

"Yes, ma'am," was the answer in a weak voice.

"Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be
picking it, I know," said Miss Sally.

The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took
a key from her pocket, and opening the safe, brought from
it a dreary waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as
Stonehenge. This she placed before the small servant,
ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up a
great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening
it upon the carving-fork.

"Do you see this?" said Miss Brass, slicing off about
two square inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation,
and holding it out on the point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her
hungry eyes to see every shred of it, small as it was, and
answered, "yes."

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