“Would there be any objection to your depositing the milk upon the doorstep?” asked Mr. Clarkson.

“Righto!” came the answer, and steps retreated with a clang of pails.

“Why do the common people love to add ‘o’ to their words?” Mr. Clarkson reflected.  “Is it that they unconsciously appreciate ‘o’ as the most beautiful of vowel sounds?  But I wonder whether I ought to have blacked that range before I lighted the fire?  The ironwork certainly looks rather pre-Dreadnought!  What I require most just now is a hot bath, and I’d soon have one if I only knew which of these little slides to pull out.  But if I pulled out the wrong one, there might be an explosion, and then what would become of the History of the Masque?”

So he put on a kettle, and waited uneasily for it to sing as a kettle should.  “Now I’ll shave,” he said; “and when I am less like that too conscientious Othello, I’ll go out and buy something for breakfast.”

The bath was distinctly cool, but when he got out there was a satisfaction in the water’s hue, and, though chilled to the bone, he carried his pyjamas upstairs with a feeling of something accomplished.  On entering his bedroom, he was confronted by his disordered pillow, and a bed like a map of Switzerland in high relief.  “Courage!” he cried, “I will make it at once.  The secret of labour-saving is organisation.”

So, with a certain asperity, he dragged off the clothes, and flung the mattress over, while the bedstead rolled about under the unaccustomed violence.  “Rightly does the Scot talk about sorting a bed!” he thought, as he wrenched the blankets asunder, and stood wondering whether the black border should be tucked in at the sides or the feet.  At last he pulled the counterpane fairly smooth, but in an evil moment, looking under the bed, he perceived large quantities of fluffy and coagulated dust.

“I know what that is,” he said.  “That’s called flue, and it must be removed.  Swift advised the chambermaid, if she was in haste, to sweep the dust into a corner of the room, but leave her brush upon it, that it might not be seen, for that would disgrace her.  Well, there is no one to see me, so I must do it as I can.”

He crawled under the bed, and gathering the flue together in his two hands, began throwing it out of the window.  “Pity it isn’t nesting season for the birds,” he said, as he watched it float away.  But this process was too slow; so taking his towel, he dusted the drawers, the washing-stand, and the greater part of the floor, shaking the towel out of the window, until, in his eagerness, he dropped it into the back garden, and it lay extended upon the wash-house roof.

Tranquillity had now vanished, and solitude was losing some of its charm.  It was quite time he started for the office, but he had not begun to dress, and, except for the kettle, which he could hear boiling over downstairs, there was not a gleam of breakfast.  After washing again, he put on his clothes hurriedly, and determined to postpone the remainder of his physical exercise till his return in the evening.