'And by Jove!' thought Dick, 'she's going to feed the small 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 immediately 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 disfigured 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 starvation.

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.