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 was screwed up so tight as to hold no more than a 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 on.

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 opened the safe, and brought from it a dreary waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge.  This she placed before the small servant, and then, taking up a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it.

“Do you see this?” she said, slicing off about two square inches of cold mutton, and holding it out on the point of a fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see every shred of it and answered, “Yes.”

“Then don’t you ever go and say,” retorted Miss Sally, “that you hadn’t meat here.  There, eat it up.”

This was soon done.

“Now, do you want any more?” said Miss Sally.

The hungry creature answered with a faint “No.”  They were evidently going through an established form.

“You’ve been helped once to meat,” said Miss Brass, summing up the facts; “you have had as much as you can eat:  you’re asked if you want any more, and you answer ‘No.’  Then don’t you ever go and say you were allowanced,—­mind that!”

With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away, locked the meat-safe, and then overlooked the small servant while she finished the potatoes.  After that, without the smallest cause, she rapped the child with the blade of the knife, now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her back.  Then, after walking slowly backward towards the door, she darted suddenly forward, and falling on the small servant again, gave her some hard blows with her clenched fists.  The victim cried, but in a subdued manner, as if she feared to raise her voice; and Miss Sally ascended the stairs just as Richard had safely reached the office, fairly beside himself with anger over the poor child’s misery and ill-treatment.