’"So,” I says to myself, “there you are.  Well, Mr Arab, or whatever, or whoever, you may be, I’ll take good care that you don’t go out again before you’ve had a word from me.  I’ll show you that landladies have their rights, like other Christians, in this country, however it may be in yours.”  So I kept an eye on the house, to see that he didn’t go out again, and nobody never didn’t, and between seven and eight I goes and I knocks at the door,—­because I thought to myself that the earlier I was the better it might be.

’If you’ll believe me, no more notice was taken of me than if I was one of the dead.  I hammers, and I hammers, till my wrist was aching, I daresay I hammered twenty times,—­and then I went round to the back door, and I hammers at that,—­but it wasn’t the least good in the world.  I was that provoked to think I should be treated as if I was nothing and nobody, by a dirty foreigner, who went about in a bed-gown through the public streets, that it was all I could do to hold myself.

’I comes round to the front again, and I starts hammering at the window, with every knuckle on my hands, and I calls out, “I’m Miss Louisa Coleman, and I’m the owner of this house, and you can’t deceive me,—­I saw you come in, and you’re in now, and if you don’t come and speak to me this moment I’ll have the police.”

’All of a sudden, when I was least expecting it, and was hammering my very hardest at the pane, up goes the blind, and up goes the window too, and the most awful-looking creature ever I heard of, not to mention seeing, puts his head right into my face,—­he was more like a hideous baboon than anything else, let alone a man.  I was struck all of a heap, and plumps down on the little wall, and all but tumbles head over heels backwards, And he starts shrieking, in a sort of a kind of English, and in such a voice as I’d never heard the like,—­it was like a rusty steam engine.

’"Go away! go away!  I don’t want you!  I will not have you,—­never!  You have your fifty pounds,—­you have your money,—­that is the whole of you,—­that is all you want!  You come to me no more!—­ never!—­never no more!—­or you be sorry!—­Go away!”

’I did go away, and that as fast as ever my legs would carry me,—­ what with his looks, and what with his voice, and what with the way that he went on, I was nothing but a mass of trembling.  As for answering him back, or giving him a piece of my mind, as I had meant to, I wouldn’t have done it not for a thousand pounds.  I don’t mind confessing, between you and me, that I had to swallow four cups of tea, right straight away, before my nerves was steady.

’"Well,” I says to myself, when I did feel, as it might be, a little more easy, “you never have let that house before, and now you’ve let it with a vengeance,—­so you have.  If that there new tenant of yours isn’t the greatest villain that ever went unhung it must be because he’s got near relations what’s as bad as himself,—­because two families like his I’m sure there can’t be.  A nice sort of Arab party to have sleeping over the road he is!”