elders talked about the weather, the political
disturbances, uneasily. Mrs. Batten left the
room. She returned in a flood of tears, and
whispered, sobbingly to Batten. The chemist
started, trembled, rose and spoke—

"Oh, children! children! " he said, wringing
his meek little hands, " I fear you must
make out the rest of your dinner with cake
and wine!"

Good gracious! what had happened? Had
the French cuisinière sunk under syncope?
Had her sweetheart, the Sapeur-pompier,
arrived, and revenged her by sabering Irish
Mary? Was the pudding spoilt? Yet we
could smell it still (all odours are sentient in
a French house), but, mingled with the smell,
came soughing on the draught (all French
houses are full of draughts) a wild demoniac
sound, as of some person singing in the upper
storey.

I know not what impulse seized us, but we
all rushed up-stairs — Captain Chiff leading
the van, bravely, the Battens bringing up the
rear, weeping, and we, children, hovering on
the flanks like skirmishers. We reached the
kitchen, and there we saw a sight that would
have made sore eyes sorer. Everything was
in confusion; but on the hearth confusion
was worse confounded. There, O lovers of
Christmas and its cheer, there was the
remainder of our looked-forward-to dinner!
Beef, pudding, mincepies, vegetables, melted
butter, charcoal, ashes, brandy-sauce, saucepan-
lids, and horse-radish, all blended together
in one hideous holocaust; and in the
midst of the ruins of this culinary Carthage
sat the infamous Irish Marius, wildly drumming
with her heels on the floor, and with a
ladle upon a stewpan!

She was tipsy. Her hair was dishevelled;
her face was red. Empty bottles of every
description (she was not particular in her
drink, though she preferred rum)
betokened the way she had been going. But she
heeded not our presence; and in the very
face of Nemesis — of us, defrauded innocents
—of her wronged master and mistress — thus
she sang, in a loud, long-sustained howl—

Flare up, Mary!
Flare up, Mary!
Fiddle iddle um turn
Tow row! row!

Slowly and sadly we descended the stairs,
to make out the rest of our dinner with cake
and wine. As we regained the salon, the air
and the words that the wretched woman was
singing changed. She sang—

Hee roar, up she rouses,
What shall we do with the drunken sailor?

What was to be done with the drunken
sailor was a secondary consideration to what
was to be done with the drunken cook. She
could not be paid her wages, turned out of
doors, or given in charge in a foreign land.
I believe Batten sent her back to Connaught
at the earliest opportunity. But he never
gave any more Christmas dinners.

Of Christmas disaster number two, though
I was personally concerned in, and a sufferer
by it, I must speak more in the third than in
the first person. Indeed many of the
circumstances which helped to lift the veil of
mystery that at first enveloped this disaster
were only subsequently elicited by the testimony
of other parties. Witnesses had to be
examined, evidence sifted and compared,
before the full horror of the event that took
place in Rhododendron Villa, Addison Road,
Bayswater, could be fully comprehended or
placed before the public in a narrative form.

An interval of ten years must be supposed
to have elapsed between the first and second
Christmas disaster. I had grown above side-tables,
and had a soul too haughty to have
my meat chopped. I was old enough to
shave, to blush, and to be in debt. I was
old enough to feel a pleasure, and call it
pain — to fall in love with a stay-busk, some
crenoline, and some false hair, and think that
it was lovely woman. I was old enough, in fine,
to be invited to eat my Christmas dinner at
the hospitable mansion of Mr. Charkison
Rabbets, one of the eighteen clerks of the
Petty-sky-blue-seal Office (since abolished),
and fool enough to have my hair curled, and
to put on silk stockings and pumps.

We were very genteel — oh, excruciatingly
genteel, but not very lively. Our boots were
as bright as the fire-irons, and the younger
portion of us, when spoken to, blushed a much
deeper red than the fire. A footpage opened
the door. We were waited upon at dinner
by a stately female domestic, who was an
astonishing compromise between a housemaid
and a thoroughbred footman. She wore
ringlets, but they ought to have been
powdered; she wore an apron, but it should have
been plush.

The dinner was very genteel. We had
fish; boiled turkey and oyster sauce; kick-shaws.
People drank wine with one another,
and had affections of the spinal marrow in
doing so. I made my usual highly-successful
mistake of pouring sherry into a port-wine
glass, following it up by my inimitable feats
of upsetting my glass, turning a deep peony
red, looking at myself in my spoon, and then
wishing that I could sink through the earth,
that the pudding would come, or that I were
dead.

The pudding: it was below, and though
Mr. Charkison Rabbets was a genteel man, in
the copper. It was below, under custody of
Jane Buck the cook. It was still imprisoned
in its cloth, leaping, bubbling, blobbing,
rumbling in its cavernous bath of boiling
water. It had yet to be withdrawn, to be
plunged into cold water, to be garnished with
holly, and soused in brandy sauce, and to be
served up on the dining-room table, to the
pride of Jane Buck the cook, and the delight
of a genteel party.