“Why don’t you show ’em yourself?  You seem to know all about ’em,” said Dick.

“Miss Sally said I wasn’t to, because people wouldn’t believe the attendance was good if they saw how small I was, first.”

“Well, but they’ll see how small you are afterwards, won’t they?” said Dick.

“Ah! but then they’ll have taken ’em for a fortnight certain,” replied the child, with a shrewd look; “and people don’t like moving when they’re once settled.”

“This is a queer sort of thing,” muttered Dick, rising.  “What do you mean to say you are—­the cook?”

“Yes; I do plain cooking,” replied the child.  “I’m housemaid too.  I do all the work of the house.”

Just then certain sounds on the passage and staircase seemed to denote the applicant’s impatience.  Richard Swiveller, therefore, hurried out to meet and treat with the single gentleman.

He was a little surprised to perceive that the sounds were occasioned by the progress upstairs of a trunk, which the single gentleman and his coachman were endeavoring to convey up the steep ascent.  Mr. Swiveller followed slowly behind, entering a new protest on every stair against the house of Mr. Sampson Brass being thus taken by storm.

To these remonstrances the single gentleman answered not a word, but when the trunk was at last got into the bedroom, sat down upon it, and wiped his bald head with his handkerchief.  He then announced abruptly that he would take the room for two years, whereupon, handing a ten-pound note to the astonished Mr. Swiveller, he began to make ready to retire, as if it were night instead of day, and Mr. Swiveller walked downstairs into the office again, filled with wonderment concerning both the strange new lodger and the small servant who had appeared to answer the bell.

After that day, one circumstance troubled Mr. Swiveller’s mind very much, and that was, that the small servant always remained somewhere in the bowels of the earth under Bevis Marks, and never came to the surface unless a bell rang, when she would answer it, and immediately disappear again.  She never went out, or came into the office, or had a clean face, or took off the coarse apron, or looked out of any of the windows, or stood at the street door for a breath of air, or had any rest or enjoyment whatever.  Nobody ever came to see her, nobody spoke of her, nobody cared about her.

“Now,” said Dick, one day, walking up and down with his hands in his pockets; “I’d give something—­if I had it—­to know how they use that child, and where they keep her.  I should like to know how they use her!”

At that moment he caught a glimpse of Miss Brass flitting down the kitchen stairs.  “And, by Jove!” thought Dick, “She’s going to feed the small servant.  Now or never!”

First peeping over the handrail, he groped his way down, and arrived at the kitchen door immediately after Miss Brass had entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton.