How she views the universe from her altitude of a yard, or a yard and three inches; what her attitude is to God and man, and how life goes with the old veteran after seventy odd years of its buffeting—­these were some of the mysteries which I brought with me into her back room by the riverside for their unveiling by Miss Emma Stipp herself.

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“I’m late this mornin’, I am,” she says, in her shrill fashion, standing right against the fire like a demon that no flame can consume, and vigorously rubbing at the grate with her black-lead brush.  “The cause is ’im,” she continues, turning to point the brush at the cat sleeping on her bed, after she has rubbed the red tip of her long nose with a portion of her knuckles and a portion of the brush.  “Oh, he’s a villain, a dreadful villain he is,” she cries, with exasperation, returning to her work; “he worries my life out, he do, the ’orrid varmint.  Last night he didn’t come home, he didn’t.  I set up for him, but he didn’t come.  ‘Oh,’ I says, ‘if you’re keepin’ low company again,’ I says, ’you can stop out all night,’ I says, ’for I’ll sit up for you no longer; so there, my ugly beauty.’  And then in the middle of the night I wake up, I do, feeling that cold, and sneezin’ and snuffin’, and irritatin’ I was from top to toe; and blest if Master Tom hadn’t got upon the window-sill, bust open that there piece of brown paper I had pasted over the broken pane, I had, and let hisself in Yankee-doodle fashion, and left me to perish with the cold.”

Her lined and wrinkled face, when she turns it to us, is not without the vestiges of attraction.  The head, with its grey hair parted down the centre, is well-shaped; the forlorn-looking eyes are a pale-blue, like faded forget-me-nots; the thin, flexible nose, which is always moist, and the long, firm chin incline towards the formation known as the nut-cracker.  But for her abbreviated trunk, and those few pathetic inches of twisted leg—­chiefly feet—­she might have passed for a matronly-looking and rather handsome old harridan, half Scotch and half Irish.

“What with the cat,” she says, and then, letting her voice run up to a screech, she proceeds furiously, “and that devil of a woman downstairs!  Oh! she’s a wicked woman, she is, a wicked woman, a very wicked woman; she’s got some of my things because I’m behind-hand in my rent, and she says she won’t give them up; but she shall.  I’ll see that she do.  Ah!  I’ll have the law on her—­the nasty, swearing, beastly—­Oh! she’s a wicked woman.”

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