left by the will is squandered away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made a dead letter.  All through the deplorable cause everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers, and must go down the middle and up again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch’s sabbath.  And we can’t get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and must be parties to it, whether we like it or not.  But it won’t do to think of it!  Thinking of it drove my great-uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, to blow his brains out.”

“I hope sir—­” said I.

“I think you had better call me Guardian, my dear.”

“I hope, Guardian,” said I, giving the housekeeping keys the least shake in the world, “that you may not be trusting too much to my discretion.  I am not clever, and that’s the truth.”

“You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives here, my dear,” he returned playfully; “the little old woman of the rhyme, who sweeps the cobwebs of the sky, and you will sweep them out of our sky in the course of your housekeeping, Esther.”

This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort, that my own soon became quite lost.

One of the things I noticed from the first about my guardian was that, though he was always doing a thousand acts of kindness, he could not bear any acknowledgments.

We had somehow got to see more of Miss Flite on our visits to London:  for the Lord Chancellor always had to be consulted before Richard could settle in any profession, and as Richard first wanted to be a doctor and then tired of that in favour of the army, there were several consultations.  I remember one visit because it was the first time we met Mr. Woodcourt.

My guardian and Ada and I heard of Miss Flite having been ill, and when we called we found a medical gentleman attending her in her garret in Lincoln’s Inn.

Miss Flite dropped a general curtsy.

“Honoured, indeed,” she said, “by another visit from the wards in Jarndyce!  Very happy to receive Jarndyce of Bleak House beneath my humble roof!”

“Has she been very ill?” asked Mr. Jarndyce in a whisper of the doctor.

“Oh, decidedly unwell!” she answered confidentially.  “Not pain, you know—­trouble.  Only Mr. Woodcourt knows how much.  My physician, Mr. Woodcourt”—­with great stateliness—­“The wards in Jarndyce; Jarndyce of Bleak House.  The kindest physician in the college,” she whispered to me.  “I expect a judgment.  On the Day of Judgment.  And shall then confer estates.”