by coming in the evening-tide among the
desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also aristocratic,
grace upon the office. Seated, with her needlework or netting apparatus, at the
window, she had a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her ladylike
deportment, the rude business aspect of the place. With this impression of her
interesting character upon her, Mrs. Sparsit considered herself, in some sort,
the Bank Fairy. The townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her
there, regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the
mine.
    What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did. Gold and
silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring vague
destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she disliked),
were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof. For the rest, she knew that
after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the office furniture, and over
a locked-up iron room with three locks, against the door of which strong chamber
the light porter laid his head every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared
at cockcrow. Further, she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the
basement, sharply spiked off from communication with the predatory world; and
over the relics of the current day's work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out
pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that nothing
interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit tried. Lastly,
she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and carbines, arrayed in
vengeful order above one of the official chimney-pieces; and over that
respectable tradition never to be separated from a place of business claiming to
be wealthy - a row of fire-buckets - vessels calculated to be of no physical
utility on any occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost
equal to bullion, on most beholders.
    A deaf serving-woman and the light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit's empire.
The deaf serving-woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying had for years
gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she would be murdered some
night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her money. It was generally
considered, indeed, that she had been due some time, and ought to have fallen
long ago; but she had kept her life, and her situation, with an ill-conditioned
tenacity that occasioned much offence and disappointment.
    Mrs