"What are you doing?" shrieked Mrs. Lindsay, quite off her guard, purple with passion. "Mr. Grunter, how dare you spoil other people's things in that manner ?”

Mr. Grunter looked up, thunderstruck, aghast; had the canary singing before him been suddenly transformed into a turkey-cock, he would not have been more ineffably surprised and astounded.

However, he was rather of a disposition to yield with the tyrant, and to tyrannize with the yielding; so, while the colour slowly forsook his large face, and his very wig quivered, he said:

"I beg your pardon, madam, if I have done any harm; but I thought it best to dry it as soon as possible."

"Dry it! what, by spreading it all over the room?" said Mrs. Lindsay, who now perceived that some of the ink had fallen on the blue merinos curtain, and some on the cushion

E 2

of an ottoman close by-look there; look what you have done!"

Grunter followed the direction of her eye; on the ottoman lay his pedigree-at least, that sheet of it which the wind had blown away, and which had caused all this commotion. "I can easily write it out again, madam," he said, "if you think it illegible; but I can shew you the link between your branch of the Gubbs' family and mine in a minute ;" and, seizing the paper, his immense inky finger and thumb came in contact with the light blue ottoman, and left another stain.

"I do not wish to see it; it is all a mistake. I deny any such relationship, and while you are here, Mr. Grunter, I would thank you to be a little more careful. If my daughter Ellen chooses to have her room destroyed in this manner, I do not. I shall complain to my brother-in-law."

"Madam," said Grunter, roused at length, "I have made every possible apology for a

mere accident, and now I too shall state this affair, and the way in which you have rebuked me, to Mr. Lindsay."

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Pray do. I assure you, I care as little -"one may guess what anger prompted, but a moment's reflection condemned-" as little .....as any such report deserves;" so saying, she flounced away......

"Ha, ha!" said Grunter to himself, a light slowly breaking in on his obtuse brain, "this is owing to what Mr. Lindsay has told her of his ruin-silly enough to tell her, and against my advice she doesn't care now for him, or even for me! Be it so! he might have kept his own counsel, and have fared well here. I will walk forth to meet him, and to tell my story. The time may come yet when she will rue this day."

So saying, he again violently and vindictively rubbed his foot in the pool of ink, and then left the room in the care of a housemaid, who entered at that moment with soap, scrubbing-brush, and pail.

"Misfortunes," as Manzoni observes, and as we must all have perceived, "love a crowd." When Mrs. Lindsay, flushed, trembling, and irate, entered the drawing-room, an object met her view, which rekindled her wrath, and fanned it into a far fiercer flame than before. A scrunching sound having attracted her attention, she looked in the direction whence it came, and there beheld Screech, the cockatoo, who, deprived of his habitual perch (which, by the bye, was obliged to be renewed every month), had been most industriously exercising his beak on two rosewood chairs and part of the wainscoting. The carpet was literally strewed with the proofs of his illdirected energy. In an uncontrollable passion she darted at the bird, and knocked him down from a corner of the chair on which he had perched, and whence, coquettishly and (as she thought) mockingly, putting his head on one side, and glancing at her with his round, black eye, in his softest tone he said, "Cockatoo...."

An instant convinced Mrs. Lindsay of her error; for Screech's vengeance (like Mazaroni's)" was sweeping as it was sure." With extended wings, and with his plume of yellow feathers rearing itself perpendicularly above his black and eagle beak-which, opening, showed a round and jetty tonguehe flew at his assailant, who screamed and yelled, and vainly tried to ward him off. Protecting her face with a cushion she caught up, she, for a moment, paused to take breath; when, to her unspeakable horror, she found Screech had dug his dreadful beak into her foot.

Visions of lock-jaw flitted before her mind -she kicked and roared in terror and in torture, but Screech was firm. The noise roused Fatima and her daughters from an adjoining room. They came but, alas! only to Screech's aid! Luckily for Mrs. Lindsay, they were toothless, for they flew at her with all the warmth of injured and avenging friend