The total was seventeen shillings and sixpence, and as Mrs. Hobbs
wrote upon it, in her neat English hand, 'Received payment, with
respectful thanks,' she carefully blotted the wet ink, and remarked
casually that service was not included in 'attendance,' but that she
would leave the amount to me.



Chapter XVIII. I meet Mrs. Bobby.



Mrs. Bobby and I were born for each other, though we have been a
long time in coming together. She is the pink of neatness and
cheeriness, and she has a broad, comfortable bosom on which one
might lay a motherless head, if one felt lonely in a stranger land.
I never look at her without remembering what the poet Samuel Rogers
said of Lady Parke: 'She is so good that when she goes to heaven
she will find no difference save that her ankles will be thinner and
her head better dressed.'

No raw fowls visit my bedside here; food comes as I wish it to come
when I am painting, like manna from heaven. Mrs. Bobby brings me
three times a day something to eat, and though it is always whatever
she likes, I always agree in her choice, and send the blue dishes
away empty. She asked me this morning if I enjoyed my 'h'egg,' and
remarked that she had only one fowl, but it laid an egg for me every
morning, so I might know it was 'fresh as fresh.' It is certainly
convenient: the fowl lays the egg from seven to seven-thirty, I eat