First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to

disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived

at the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass had

entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. 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, which was a wide

one, was wound and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a

little 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 upon. The pinched and

meagre aspect of the place would have killed a chameleon. He would

have known, at the first mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and

must have given up the ghost in despair.

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 took a key from her

pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold

potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the

small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up a

great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the

carving-fork.

Do you see this?' said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square inches

of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out on the

point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to

see every shred of it, small as it was, 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.

The Old Curiosity Shop