Dustpanful

If he have cunning and greed enough, the workhouse boy sent out to sweep an office may learn how to sweep money by the dustpan[-]ful out of his neighbours’ tills, may learn to be a famous “operator” in the money market, and to die in the blessed assurance that he is bequeathing a plum to his heirs.

The last nail was driven, the last dustpanful of litter removed to its home in the new dust-hole;[…]

The walls and ceiling of the servants’ offices and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably diminishing their number.

If my woman had only been sharp enough to have punched out the bottoms of a couple of chairs and sprinkled a few dustpansful of dirt over the floor, her visitor’s pocketbook would have shown up quicker than scat!