has friends around her, the house-hunters rally
in the drawing-room. They rally in the kitchen,
moreover, when the joint is just " put down,"
and peep at it furtively behind the
meat-screen.

Also, how they stare! At you, the proprietor,
they stare so ferociously, that you ask yourself
whether you really do bear the semblance
of the human form, or whether you are an anthropop,
with your head beneath your shoulders?
They stare at your papers, at your letters lying
open on the table, at your egg-shells, and at
your streaky beef. They back out of the room
in which you are sitting, in order that they may
see the last of you, and they make an excuse
to get in again before they leave the house,
pretending that they want the measure of a certain
recess in this particular apartment, into which
they think they could squeeze a sofa of their
own—as if there weren't sofas enough already.
And mark! this stare is always one of
disapproval and suspicion.

Under these circumstances, it is impossible
for you to " settle to anything." You lose
your time and neglect business. You don't feel
as if anything in the house, or the house itself,
belonged to you. The furniture wears a
time-serving, sycophantic aspect. It will make itself
useful to somebody else in a week or a fortnight
from this time. Your dining-table will groan
(to use a popular phrase) under the weight of
another's joint, and your own especial easy-chair
will adapt itself to the curves of another's legs.
You might lock this piece of furniture away in the
dark room up-stairs, but you have already put
away a vast mass of things there, for which you
have a regard, and after all you must leave
something in the sitting-rooms. They look a little
bare and robbed of knick-knacks, so to speak,
already.

As to the people who come to inspect your
house, they are of various kinds; encouraging,
and discouraging, communicative, diffident. The
fiercest customers are ladies. There are certain
ladies of middle age, of plain appearance,
sensibly dressed in materials that won't spoil,
before whom any owner of a furnished house
may reasonably quail. Terribly wise and
practical are these ladies. You can't take them
in with your elegantly appointed sitting-rooms,
and your china, and your gimcracks, which,
by-the-by, you mean to shut up when you leave the
house. The middle-aged ladies only give one
glance round, administer the shake-test to a
suspicious looking chair which you have put into
the shade, but on which everybody pounces—
and then off they go to the bedroom and kitchen,
departments, where they are in their element.
They lift up corners of counterpanes, and peer
into bedticks. They want bed-curtains where
they are absent, and object to them where they
are present. They require additional chests of
drawers, and are of opinion that your wardrobe
with the looking-glass door takes up a great
deal of room, and holds nothing. They
object to your keeping one small room at the
top of the house locked up, and when they have
done disparaging the whole of your bedroom
arrangements, and have abused your
kitchen-range, and quarrelled with your boiler, and
scorned your oven, they take to sniffing in your
little hall, and muttering the objectionable
word " drains."

There is something gratuitously insolent
about the behaviour of these knowing ones. I
offer them the article I have to dispose of, I
don't ask them to take it, or even to look at it.
If they choose to enter, let them observe closely
and form their own conclusions. We court
examination. With the exception of that chair
with the mother of pearl let into the back—
which has obviously disagreed with its constitution—
all is fair and above-board. We don't
ask these ladies for their opinions, so let them
keep those opinions to themselves, instead of
delivering them in all parts of the house, and in
a loud key too. I even concede to these
disagreeable persons a right to sniff in the
passage, having done so myself on many
occasions; but the results of such sniffings
should never be communicated by these ladies
to each other, till they get outside.

And there is yet another class of persons who
might advantageously wait till they get outside
to say their say. These are the ladies and
gentlemen who portion out your rooms, and
discuss the changes they think it would be
desirable to make in your abode, before your
very face. They keep your wife waiting and
standing while they talk, in the drawing-room:
"Well, you know, dear, at a pinch we could put
Jane into the room with the Å“il de boeuf—no,
I forgot, that's to be locked up; very
inconvenient." " But I'll tell you what we could
do," breaks in another. " We could bring down
the washing-stand out of the top front room,
and the iron bedstead out of the garret." " Yes,
that might do; you know she's very seldom with
us, after all, dear girl; so much with the
Orpiments, Lady Orpiment told me herself in so
many words;" and so they go on.

There is, however, a possibility of simply
walking out of the room while all this is going
on, which is not the case when you get hold of
one of those scourges of society—a communicative
old gentleman, a class of individuals with
whom—if you have a house to let—you will
have very frequent dealings. He it is who once
getting into the room in which you are secreted,
begins to bow, and grin, and apologise, and
make inquiries about the healthiness of the
neighbourhood, or about anything else that
promises to give him a start. " The fact is," he
says, " that it's necessary for me to make
inquiries as to that point—my wife, only—well, I
won't mention her age, but as healthy a woman
to look at as you'd see anywhere—is suffering
from a throat affection, and I wish to be within
easy reach of Dr. Flook, with whose name you
are no doubt acquainted, and who seems to me
thoroughly to understand the case, not that I
expect that she will be long in the doctor's
hands, indeed, I hope and trust that in the
course of a month or so—although a similar