“I’ll be ready when my time comes,” she replies confidently, and with rather a sly grin, “but I’m werry well content to stay where I am till I’m called, I am.  I don’t complain of nothink, I don’t, excep’ this beastly winder-pane which lets the draught in somethink cruel, it does, enough it is to blow me out of bed; and that awful devil of a woman downstairs; and the crossin’ at the Elephant and Castle, which tries my nerves dreadful it does, and oughter be put a stop to, for it ain’t safe for nobody, let alone a cripple.  Then there’s the children,” she cries fiercely.  “Oh, they are dreadful!  You never heard sich language.  Foul-mouthed!—­oh, it’s awful; I never did in all my life hear sich disgustin’ language.  And they tease me dreadful, they do, and call after me, and follow me into shops, and throw muck at me, the dirty little blasphemin’ devils.”

She tells me, in conclusion, of a milliner’s shop where she goes for oddments, and where the young ladies sometimes give her a bit of trimming for her bonnet.  Her last action is to drop the scrubbing-brush into the pail of water, to reach out an arm, and grab with one of her claws a piece of dirty black ribbon, sticking like an old book-marker from under a pile of rubbish beside the hearth, and then to pull at the string till presently there drops upon the floor a small and battered black bonnet with another string trailing behind it in the heap of rubbish.

“There!” says Miss Stipp, holding up the fusty old bonnet, “with a bit of black velvet,” she continues, studying the flat bonnet with critical eyes, “and a nob of jet, and a orstrich feather stuck into it somewhere about there, or there perhaps, it will last me many a long day yet, and always look nice and fashionable when I go for my walks about London Bridge of a evenin’.”

She is still holding the bonnet when I stoop down to take my leave.  The beautiful address of the bishop who confirmed her so many years ago in Little Dorrit’s church is not, my life for it, half so urgent and absorbing a matter for Miss Stipp as the latest fashion.

MUSIC [Sidenote:  Samuel Johnson]

“Upon hearing a celebrated performer go through a hard composition, and hearing it remarked that it was very difficult, Dr. Johnson said, ’I would it had been impossible.’”

NEATNESS IN EXCESS [Sidenote:  Samuel Johnson]

“I asked Mr. Johnson if he ever disputed with his wife.  ‘Perpetually,’ said he; ’my wife had a particular reverence for cleanliness, and desired the praise of neatness in her dress and furniture, as many ladies do, till they become troublesome to their best friends, slaves to their own besoms, and only sigh for the hour of sweeping their husbands out of the house as dirt and useless lumber.  A clean floor is so comfortable, she would say sometimes by way of twitting; till at last I told her that I thought we had had talk enough about the floor, we would now have a touch at the ceiling.’  I asked him if he ever huffed his wife about his dinner.  ‘So often,’ replied he, ’that at last she called to me and said, “Nay, hold, Mr. Johnson, and do not make a farce of thanking God for a dinner which in a few minutes you will protest not eatable."’”