Asenath began to understand by and by that she was cold, so climbed the bank, made her way over the windy flats, the railroad, and the western bridge confusedly with an idea of going home. She turned aside by the toll-gate. The keeper came out to see what she was doing, but she kept out of his sight behind the great willow and his little blue house,—the blue house with the green blinds and red moulding. The dam thundered that night, the wind and the water being high. She made her way up above it, and looked in. She had never seen it so black and smooth there. As she listened to the roar, she remembered something that she had read—was it in the Bible or the Ledger?—about seven thunders uttering their voices.

"He's sorry for her, and all that," they said.

A dead bough shot down the current while she stood there, went over and down, and out of sight, throwing up its little branches like helpless hands.

It fell in with a thought of Asenath's, perhaps; at any rate she did not like the looks of it, and went home.

Over the bridge, and the canal, and the lighted streets, the falls called after her: "He's sorry for her, and all that." The curtain was drawn aside when she came home, and she saw her father through the window, sitting alone, with his gray head bent.

It occurred to her that she had often left him alone,—poor old father! It occurred to her, also, that she understood now what it was to be alone. Had she forgotten him in these two comforted, companioned years?

She came in weakly, and looked about.

"Dick's in, and gone to bed," said the old man, answering her look. "You're tired, Senath."

"I am tired, father."

She sunk upon the floor,—the heat of the room made her a little faint,—and laid her head upon his knee; oddly enough, she noticed that the patch on it had given way,—wondered how many days it had been so,—whether he had felt ragged and neglected while she was busy about that blue neck-tie for Dick. She put her hand up and smoothed the corners of the rent.

"You shall be mended up to-morrow, poor father!"

He smiled, pleased like a child to be remembered. She looked up at him,—at his gray hair and shrivelled face, at his blackened hands and bent shoulders, and dusty, ill-kept coat. What would it be like, if the days brought her nothing but him?

"Something's the matter with my little gal? Tell father, can't ye?"

Her face flushed hot, as if she had done him wrong. She crept up into his arms, and put her hands behind his rough old neck.

"Would you kiss me, father? You don't think I'm too ugly to kiss, maybe,—you?"

She felt better after that. She had not gone to sleep now for many a night unkissed; it had seemed hard at first.

When she had gone half-way up stairs, Dick came to the door of his room on the first floor, and called her. He held the little kerosene lamp over his head; his face was grave and pale.

"I haven't said good night, Sene."

She made no reply.

"Asenath, good night."

She stayed her steps upon the stairs without turning her head. Her father had kissed her to-night. Was not that enough?

"Why, Sene, what's the matter with you?"

Dick mounted the stairs, and touched his lips to her forehead with a gently compassionate smile.

She fled from him with a cry like the cry of a suffocated creature, shut her door, and locked it with a ringing clang.

"She's walked too far, and got a little nervous," said Dick, screwing up his lamp; "poor thing!"

Then he went into his room to look at Del's photograph awhile before he burned it up; for he meant to burn it up.

Asenath, when she had locked her door, put her lamp before the looking-glass and tore off her gray cape; tore it off so savagely that the button snapped and rolled away,—two little crystal semicircles like tears upon the floor.

There was no collar about the neck of her dress, and this heightened the plainness and the pallor of her face. She shrank instinctively at the first sight of herself, and opened the drawer where the crimson cape was folded, but shut it resolutely.

"I'll see the worst of it," she said with pinched lips. She turned herself about and about before the glass, letting the cruel light gloat, over her shoulders, letting the sickly shadows grow purple on her face. Then she put her elbows on the table and her chin into her hands, and so, for a motionless half-hour, studied the unrounded, uncolored, unlightened face that stared back at her; her eyes darkening at its eyes, her hair touching its hair, her breath dimming the outline of its repulsive mouth.

By and by she dropped her head into her hands. The poor, mistaken face! She felt as if she would like to blot it out of the world, as her tears used to blot out the wrong sums upon her slate. It had been so happy! But he was sorry for it, and all that. Why did a good God make such faces?

She slipped upon her knees, bewildered.

"He can't mean any harm nohow," she said, speaking fast, and knelt there and said it over till she felt sure of it.

Then she thought of Del once more,—of her colors and sinuous springs, and little cries and chatter.

After a time she found that she was growing faint, and so stole down into the kitchen for some food. She stayed a minute to warm her feet. The fire was red and the clock was ticking. It seemed to her home-like and comfortable, and she seemed to herself very homeless and lonely; so she sat down on the floor, with her head in a chair, and cried as hard as she ought to have done four hours ago.

She climbed into bed about one o'clock, having decided, in a dull way, to give Dick up to-morrow.

But when to-morrow came he was up with a bright face, and built the kitchen fire for her, and brought in all the water, and helped her fry the potatoes, and whistled a little about the house, and worried at her paleness, and so she said nothing about it.

"I'll wait till night," she planned, making ready for the mill.

"O, I can't!" she cried at night. So other mornings came, and other nights.

I am quite aware that, according to all romantic precedents, this conduct was preposterous in Asenath, Floracita, in the novel, never so far forgets the whole duty of a heroine as to struggle, waver, doubt, delay. It is proud and proper to free the young fellow; proudly and properly she frees him; "suffers in silence"—till she marries another man; and (having had a convenient opportunity to refuse the original lover) overwhelms the reflective reader with a sense of poetic justice and the eternal fitness of things.

But I am not writing a novel, and, as the biographer of this simple factory girl, am offered few advantages.

Asenath was no heroine, you see. Such heroic elements as were in her—none could tell exactly what they were, or whether there were any: she was one of those people in whom it is easy to be quite mistaken;—her life had not been one to develop. She might have a certain pride of her own, under given circumstances; but plants grown in a cellar will turn to the sun at any cost; how could she go back into her dark?

As for the other man to marry, he was out of the question. Then, none love with the tenacity of the unhappy; no life is so lavish of itself as the denied life: to him that hath not shall be given,—and Asenath loved this Richard Cross.

It might be altogether the grand and suitable thing to say to him, "I will not be your wife." It might be that she would thus regain a strong shade of lost self-respect. It might be that she would make him happy, and give pleasure to Del. It might be that the two young people would be her "friends," and love her in a way.

But all this meant that Dick must go out of her life. Practically, she must make up her mind to build the fires, and pump the water, and mend the windows alone. In dreary fact, he would not listen when she sung; would not say, "You are tired, Sene"; would never kiss away an undried tear. There would be nobody to notice the crimson cape, nobody to make blue neck-ties for; none for whom to save the Bonnes de Jersey, or to take sweet, tired steps, or make dear, dreamy plans. To be sure, there was her father; but fathers do not count for much in a time like this on which Sene had fallen.

That Del Ivy was—Del Ivory, added intricacies to the question. It was a very unpoetic but undoubted fact that Asenath could in no way so insure Dick's unhappiness as to pave the way to his marriage with the woman whom he loved. There would be a few merry months, then slow worry and disappointment; pretty Del accepted at last, not as the crown of his young life, but as its silent burden and misery. Poor Dick! good Dick! Who deserved more wealth of wifely sacrifice? Asenath, thinking this, crimsoned with pain and shame. A streak of good common sense in the girl told her—though she half scorned herself for the conviction—that even a crippled woman who should bear all things and hope all things for his sake might blot out the memory of this rounded Del; that, no matter what the motive with which he married her, he would end by loving his wife like other people.

She watched him sometimes in the evenings, as he turned his kind eyes after her over the library book which he was reading.

"I know I could make him happy! I know I could!" she muttered fiercely to herself.

November blew into December, December congealed into January, while she kept her silence. Dick, in his honorable heart, seeing that she suffered, wearied himself with plans to make her eyes shine; brought her two pails of water instead of one, never forgot the fire, helped her home from the mill. She saw him meet Del Ivory once upon Essex Street with a grave and silent bow; he never spoke with her now. He meant to pay the debt he owed her down to the uttermost farthing; that grew plain. Did she try to speak her wretched secret, he suffocated her with kindness, struck her dumb with tender words.

She used to analyze her life in those days, considering what it would be without him. To be up by half past five o'clock in the chill of all the winter mornings, to build the fire and cook the breakfast and sweep the floor, to hurry away, faint and weak, over the raw, slippery streets, to climb at half past six the endless stairs and stand at the endless loom, and hear the endless wheels go buzzing round, to sicken in the oily smells, and deafen at the remorseless noise, and weary of the rough girl swearing at the other end of the pass; to eat her cold dinner from a little cold tin pail out on the stairs in the three-quarters-of-an-hour recess; to come exhausted home at half past six at night, and get the supper, and brush up about the shoemaker's bench, and be too weak to eat; to sit with aching shoulders and make the button-holes of her best dress, or darn her father's stockings, till nine o'clock; to hear no bounding step or cheery whistle about the house; to creep into bed and lie there trying not to think, and wishing that so she might creep into her grave,—this not for one winter, but for all the winters,—how should you like it, you young girls, with whom time runs like a story?

The very fact that her employers dealt honorably by her; that she was fairly paid, and promptly, for her wearing toil; that the limit of endurance was consulted in the temperature of the room, and her need of rest in an occasional holiday,—perhaps, after all, in the mood she was in, did not make this factory life more easy. She would have found it rather a relief to have somebody to complain of,—wherein she was like the rest of us, I fancy.

But at last there came a day—it chanced to be the ninth of January—when Asenath went away alone at noon, and sat where Merrimack sung his songs to her. She hid her face upon her knees, and listened and thought her own thoughts, till they and the slow torment of the winter seemed greater than she could bear. So, passing her hands confusedly over her forehead, she said at last aloud, "That's what God means, Asenath Martyn!" and went back to work with a purpose in her eyes.

She "asked out" a little earlier than usual, and went slowly home. Dick was there before her; he had been taking a half-holiday. He had made the tea and toasted the bread for a little surprise. He came up and said, "Why, Sene, your hands are cold!" and warmed them for her in his own.

After tea she asked him, would he walk out with her for a little while? and he in wonder went.

The streets were brightly lighted, and the moon was up. The ice cracked crisp under their feet. Sleighs, with two riders in each, shot merrily by. People were laughing in groups before the shop-windows. In the glare of a jeweller's counter somebody was buying a wedding-ring, and a girl with red cheeks was looking hard the other way.

"Let's get away," said Asenath,—"get away from here!"

They chose by tacit consent that favorite road of hers over the eastern bridge. Their steps had a hollow, lonely ring on the frosted wood; she was glad when the softness of the snow in the road received them. She looked back once at the water, wrinkled into thin ice on the edge for a foot or two, then open and black and still.

"What are you doing?" asked Dick. She said that she was wondering how cold it was, and Dick laughed at her.

They strolled on in silence for perhaps a mile of the desolate road.

"Well, this is social!" said Dick at length; "how much farther do you want to go? I believe you'd walk to Reading if nobody stopped you!"

She was taking slow, regular steps like an automaton, and looking straight before her.

"How much farther? Oh!" She stopped and looked about her.

A wide young forest spread away at their feet, to the right and to the left. There was ice on the tiny oaks and miniature pines; it glittered sharply under the moon; the light upon the snow was blue; cold roads wound away through it, deserted; little piles of dead leaves shivered; a fine keen spray ran along the tops of the drifts; inky shadows lurked and dodged about the undergrowth; in the broad spaces the snow glared; the lighted mills, a zone of fire, blazed from east to west; the skies were bare, and the wind was up, and Merrimack in the distance chanted solemnly.

"Dick," said Asenath, "this is a dreadful place! Take me home."

But when he would have turned, she held him back with a sudden cry, and stood still.

"I meant to tell you—I meant to say—Dick! I was going to say—"

But she did not say it. She opened her lips to speak once and again, but no sound came from them.

"Sene! why, Sene, what ails you?"

He turned, and took her in his arms.

"Poor Sene!"

He kissed her, feeling sorry for her unknown trouble. He wondered why she sobbed. He kissed her again. She broke from him, and away with a great bound upon the snow.

"You make it so hard! You've no right to make it so hard! It ain't as if you loved me, Dick! I know I'm not like other girls! Go home and let me be!"

But Dick drew her arm through his, and led her gravely away. "I like you well enough, Asenath," he said, with that motherly pity in his eyes; "I've always liked you. So don't let us have any more of this."

So Asenath said nothing more.

The sleek black river beckoned to her across the snow as they went home. A thought came to her as she passed the bridge,—it is a curious study what wicked thoughts will come to good people!—she found herself considering the advisability of leaping the low brown parapet; and if it would not be like Dick to go over after her; if there would be a chance for them, even should he swim from the banks; how soon the icy current would paralyze him; how sweet it would be to chill to death there in his arms; how all this wavering and pain would be over; how Del would look when they dragged them out down below the machine-shop!

"Sene, are you cold?" asked puzzled Dick. She was warmly wrapped in her little squirrel furs; but he felt her quivering upon his arm, like one in an ague, all the way home.

About eleven o'clock that night her father waked from an exciting dream concerning the best method of blacking patent-leather; Sene stood beside his bed with her gray shawl thrown over her night-dress.

"Father, suppose some time there should be only you and me—"

"Well, well, Sene," said the old man sleepily,—"very well."

"I'd try to be a good girl! Could you love me enough to make up?"

He told her indistinctly that she always was a good girl; she never had a whipping from the day her mother died. She turned away impatiently; then cried out and fell upon her knees.

"Father, father! I'm in a great trouble. I haven't got any mother, any friend, anybody. Nobody helps me! Nobody knows. I've been thinking such things—O, such wicked things—up in my room! Then I got afraid of myself. You're good. You love me. I want you to put your hand on my head and say, 'God bless you, child, and show you how.'"

Bewildered, he put his hand upon her unbound hair, and said: "God bless you, child, and show you how!"

Asenath looked at the old withered hand a moment, as it lay beside her on the bed, kissed it, and went away.

There was a scarlet sunrise the next morning. A pale pink flush stole through a hole in the curtain, and fell across Asenath's sleeping face, and lay there like a crown. It woke her, and she threw on her dress, and sat down for a while on the window-sill, to watch the coming-on of the day.

The silent city steeped and bathed itself in rose-tints; the river ran red, and the snow crimsoned on the distant New Hampshire hills; Pemberton, mute and cold, frowned across the disk of the climbing sun, and dripped, as she had seen it drip before, with blood.

The day broke softly, the snow melted, the wind blew warm from the river. The factory-bell chimed cheerily, and a few sleepers, in safe, luxurious beds, were wakened by hearing the girls sing on their way to work.

Asenath came down with a quiet face. In her communing with the sunrise helpful things had been spoken to her. Somehow, she knew not how, the peace of the day was creeping into her heart. For some reason, she knew not why, the torment and unrest of the night were gone. There was a future to be settled, but she would not trouble herself about that just now. There was breakfast to get; and the sun shone, and a snow-bird was chirping outside of the door. She noticed how the tea-kettle hummed, and how well the new curtain, with the castle and waterfall on it, fitted the window. She thought that she would scour the closet at night, and surprise her father by finishing those list slippers; She kissed him when she had tied on the red hood, and said good-by to Dick, and told them just where to find the squash-pie for dinner.

When she had closed the twisted gate, and taken a step or two upon the snow, she came thoughtfully back. Her father was on his bench, mending one of Meg Match's shoes. She pushed it gently out of his hands, sat down upon his lap, and stroked the shaggy hair away from his forehead.

"Father!"

"Well, what now, Sene?—what now?"

"Sometimes I believe I've forgotten you a bit, you know. I think we're going to be happier after this. That's all."

She went out singing, and he heard the gate shut again with a click.

Sene was a little dizzy that morning,—the constant palpitation of the floors always made her dizzy after a wakeful night,—and so her colored cotton threads danced out of place, and troubled her.

Del Ivory, working beside her, said, "How the mill shakes! What's going on?"

"It's the new machinery they're h'isting in," observed the overseer, carelessly. "Great improvement, but heavy, very heavy; they calc'late on getting it all into place to-day; you'd better be tending to your frame, Miss Ivory."

As the day wore on, the quiet of Asenath's morning deepened. Round and round with the pulleys over her head she wound her thoughts of Dick. In and out with her black and dun-colored threads she spun her future. Pretty Del, just behind her, was twisting a pattern like a rainbow. She noticed this, and smiled.

"Never mind!" she thought, "I guess God knows."

Was He ready "to bless her, and show her how"? She wondered. If, indeed, it were best that she should never be Dick's wife, it seemed to her that He would help her about it. She had been a coward last night; her blood leaped in her veins with shame at the memory of it. Did He understand? Did He not know how she loved Dick, and how hard it was to lose him?

However that might be, she began to feel at rest about herself. A curious apathy about means and ways and decisions took possession of her. A bounding sense that a way of escape was provided from all her troubles, such as she had when her mother died, came upon her.

Years before, an unknown workman in South Boston, casting an iron pillar upon its core, had suffered it to "float" a little, a very little more, till the thin, unequal side cooled to the measure of an eighth of an inch. That man had provided Asenath's way of escape.

She went out at noon with her luncheon, and found a place upon the stairs, away from the rest, and sat there awhile, with her eyes upon the river, thinking. She could not help wondering a little, after all, why God need to have made her so unlike the rest of his fair handiwork. Del came bounding by, and nodded at her carelessly. Two young Irish girls, sisters,—the beauties of the mill,—magnificently colored creatures,—were singing a little love-song together, while they tied on their hats to go home.

"There are such pretty things in the world!" thought poor Sene.

Did anybody speak to her after the girls were gone? Into her heart these words fell suddenly, "He hath no form nor comeliness. His visage was so marred more than any man."

They clung to her fancy all the afternoon. She liked the sound of them. She wove them in with her black and dun colored threads.

The wind began at last to blow chilly up the stair-cases, and in at the cracks; the melted drifts out under the walls to harden; the sun dipped above the dam; the mill dimmed slowly; shadows crept down between the frames.

"It's time for lights," said Meg Match, and swore a little at her spools.

Sene, in the pauses of her thinking, heard snatches of the girls' talk.

"Going to ask out to-morrow, Meg?"

"Guess so, yes; me and Bob Smith we thought we'd go to Boston, and come up in the theatre train."

"Del Ivory, I want the pattern of your zouave."

"Did I go to church? No, you don't catch me! If I slave all the week, I'll do what I please on Sunday."

"Hush-sh! There's the boss looking over here!"

"Kathleen Donnavon, be still with your ghost-stories. There's one thing in the world I never will hear about, and that's dead people."

"Del," said Sene, "I think to-morrow—"

She stopped. Something strange had happened to her frame; it jarred, buzzed, snapped; the threads untwisted and flew out of place.

"Curious!" she said, and looked up.

Looked up to see her overseer turn wildly, clap his hands to his head, and fall; to hear a shriek from Del that froze her blood; to see the solid ceiling gape above her; to see the walls and windows stagger; to see iron pillars reel, and vast machinery throw up its helpless, giant arms, and a tangle of human faces blanch and writhe!

She sprang as the floor sunk. As pillar after pillar gave way, she bounded up an inclined plane, with the gulf yawning after her. It gained upon her, leaped at her, caught her; beyond were the stairs and an open door; she threw out her arms, and struggled on with hands and knees, tripped in the gearing, and saw, as she fell, a square, oaken beam above her yield and crash; it was of a fresh red color; she dimly wondered why,—as she felt her hands-slip, her knees slide, support, time, place, and reason, go utterly out.

"At ten minutes before five, on Tuesday, the tenth of January, the Pemberton Mill, all hands being at the time on duty, fell to the ground."

So the record flashed over the telegraph wires, sprang into large type in the newspapers, passed from lip to lip, a nine days' wonder, gave place to the successful candidate, and the muttering South, and was forgotten.

Who shall say what it was to the seven hundred and fifty souls who were buried in the ruins? What to the eighty-eight who died that death of exquisite agony? What to the wrecks of men and women who endure unto this day a life that is worse than death? What to that architect and engineer who, when the fatal pillars were first delivered to them for inspection, had found one broken under their eyes, yet accepted the contract, and built with them a mill whose thin walls and wide, unsupported stretches might have tottered over massive columns and on flawless ore?

One that we love may go upon battle-ground, and we are ready for the worst: we have said our good-bys; our hearts wait and pray: it is his life, not his death, which is the surprise. But that he should go out to his safe, daily, commonplace occupations, unnoticed and uncaressed,—scolded a little, perhaps, because he leaves the door open, and tells us how cross we are this morning; and they bring him up the steps by and by, a mangled mass of death and horror,—that is hard.

Old Martyn, working at Meg Match's shoes,—she was never to wear those shoes, poor Meg!—heard, at ten minutes before five, what he thought to be the rumble of an earthquake under his very feet, and stood with bated breath, waiting for the crash. As nothing further appeared to happen, he took his stick and limped out into the street.

A vast crowd surged through it from end to end. Women with white lips were counting the mills,—Pacific, Atlantic, Washington,—Pemberton? Where was Pemberton?

Where Pemberton had winked its many eyes last night, and hummed with its iron lips this noon, a cloud of dust, black, silent, horrible, puffed a hundred feet into the air.

Asenath opened her eyes after a time. Beautiful green and purple lights had been dancing about her, but she had had no thoughts. It occurred to her now that she must have been struck upon the head. The church-clocks were striking eight. A bonfire which had been built at, a distance, to light the citizens in the work of rescue, cast a little gleam in through the debris across her two hands, which lay clasped together at her side. One of her fingers, she saw, was gone; it was the finger which held Dick's little engagement ring. The red beam lay across her forehead, and drops dripped from it upon her eyes. Her feet, still tangled in the gearing which had tripped her, were buried beneath a pile of bricks.

A broad piece of flooring, that had fallen slantwise, roofed her in, and saved her from the mass of iron-work overhead, which would have crushed the breath out of Titans. Fragments of looms, shafts, and pillars were in heaps about. Some one whom she could not see was dying just behind her. A little girl who worked in her room—a mere child—was crying, between her groans, for her mother. Del Ivory sat in a little open space, cushioned about with reels of cotton; she had a shallow gash upon her cheek; she was wringing her hands. They were at work from the outside, sawing entrances through the labyrinth of planks. A dead woman lay close by, and Sene saw them draw her out. It was Meg Match. One of the pretty Irish girls was crushed quite out of sight; only one hand was free; she moved it feebly. They could hear her calling for Jimmy Mahoney, Jimmy Mahoney! and would they be sure and give him back the handkerchief? Poor Jimmy Mahoney! By and by she called no more; and in a little while the hand was still. On the other side of the slanted flooring some one prayed aloud. She had a little baby at home. She was asking God to take care of it for her. "For Christ's sake," she said. Sene listened long for the Amen, but it was never spoken. Beyond, they dug a man out from under a dead body, unhurt. He crawled to his feet, and broke into furious blasphemies.

As consciousness came fully, agony grew. Sene shut her lips and folded her bleeding hands together, and uttered no cry. Del did screaming enough for two, she thought. She pondered things, calmly as the night deepened, and the words that the workers outside were saying came brokenly to her. Her hurt, she knew, was not unto death; but it must be cared for before very long; how far could she support this slow bleeding away? And what were the chances that they could hew their way to her without crushing her?

She thought of her father, of Dick; of the bright little kitchen and supper-table set for three; of the song that she had sung in the flush of the morning. Life—even her life—grew sweet, now that it was slipping from her.

Del cried presently, that they were cutting them out. The glare of the bonfires struck through an opening; saws and axes flashed; voices grew distinct.

"They never can get at me," said Sene. "I must be able to crawl. If you could get some of those bricks off of my feet, Del!"

Del took off two or three in a frightened way; then, seeing the blood on them, sat down and cried.

A Scotch girl, with one arm shattered, crept up and removed the pile, then fainted.

The opening broadened, brightened; the sweet night-wind blew in; the safe night-sky shone through. Sene's heart leaped within her. Out in the wind and under the sky she should stand again, after all! Back in the little kitchen, where the sun shone, and she could sing a song, there would yet be a place for her. She worked her head from under the beam, and raised herself upon her elbow.

At that moment she heard a cry:

"Fire! fire! GOD ALMIGHTY HELP THEM,—THE RUINS ARE ON FIRE!"

A man working over the debris from the outside had taken the notion—it being rather dark just there—to carry a lantern with him.

"For God's sake," a voice cried from the crowd, "don't stay there with that light!"

But before the words had died upon the air, it was the dreadful fate of the man with the lantern to let it fall,—and it broke upon the ruined mass.

That was at nine o'clock. What there was to see from then till morning could never be told or forgotten.

A network twenty feet high, of rods and girders, of beams, pillars, stairways, gearing, roofing, ceiling, walling; wrecks of looms, shafts, twisters, pulleys, bobbins, mules, locked and interwoven; wrecks of human creatures wedged in; a face that you know turned up at you from some pit which twenty-four hours' hewing could not open; a voice that you know crying after you from God knows where; a mass of long, fair hair visible here, a foot there, three fingers of a hand over there; the snow bright-red under foot; charred limbs and headless trunks tossed about; strong men carrying covered things by you, at sight of which other strong men have fainted; the little yellow jet that flared up, and died in smoke, and flared again, leaped out, licked the cotton-bales, tasted the oiled machinery, crunched the netted wood, danced on the heaped-up stone, threw its cruel arms high into the night, roared for joy at helpless firemen, and swallowed wreck, death, and life together out of your sight,—the lurid thing stands alone in the gallery of tragedy.

"Del," said Sene, presently, "I smell the smoke." And in a little while, "How red it is growing away over there at the left!"

To lie here and watch the hideous redness crawling after her, springing at her!—it had seemed greater than reason could bear, at first.

Now it did not trouble her. She grew a little faint, and her thoughts wandered. She put her head down upon her arm, and shut her eyes. Dreamily she heard them saying a dreadful thing outside, about one of the overseers; at the alarm of fire he had cut his throat, and before the flames touched him he was taken out. Dreamily she heard Del cry that the shaft behind the heap of reels was growing hot. Dreamily she saw a tiny puff of smoke struggle through the cracks of a broken fly-frame.

They were working to save her, with rigid, stern faces. A plank snapped, a rod yielded; they drew out the Scotch girl; her hair was singed; then a man with blood upon his face and wrists held down his arms.

"There's time for one more! God save the rest of ye,—I can't!"

Del sprang; then stopped,—even Del,—stopped ashamed, and looked back at the cripple.

Asenath at this sat up erect. The latent heroism in her awoke. All her thoughts grew clear and bright. The tangled skein of her perplexed and troubled winter unwound suddenly. This, then, was the way. It was better so. God had provided himself a lamb for the burnt-offering.

So she said, "Go, Del, and tell him I sent you with my dear love, and that it's all right."

And Del at the first word went.

Sene sat and watched them draw her out; it was a slow process; the loose sleeve of her factory sack was scorched.

Somebody at work outside turned suddenly and caught her. It was Dick. The love which he had fought so long broke free of barrier in that hour. He kissed her pink arm where the burnt sleeve fell off. He uttered a cry at the blood upon her face. She turned faint with the sense of safety; and, with a face as white as her own, he bore her away in his arms to the hospital, over the crimson snow.

Asenath looked out through the glare and smoke with parched lips. For a scratch upon the girl's smooth cheek, he had quite forgotten her. They had left her, tombed alive here in this furnace, and gone their happy way. Yet it gave her a curious sense of relief and triumph. If this were all that she could be to him, the thing which she had done was right, quite right. God must have known. She turned away, and shut her eyes again.

When she opened them, neither Dick, nor Del, nor crimsoned snow, nor sky, were there; only the smoke writhing up a pillar of blood-red flame.

The child who had called for her mother began to sob out that she was afraid to die alone.

"Come here, Molly," said Sene. "Can you crawl around?"

Molly crawled around.

"Put your head in my lap, and your arms about my waist, and I will put my hands in yours,—so. There! I guess that's better."

But they had not given them up yet. In the still unburnt rubbish at the right, some one had wrenched an opening within a foot of Sene's face. They clawed at the solid iron pintless like savage things. A fireman fainted in the glow.

"Give it up!" cried the crowd from behind. "It can't be done! Fall back!"—then hushed, awestruck.

An old man was crawling along upon his hands and knees over the heated bricks. He was a very old man. His gray hair blew about in the wind.

"I want my little gal!" he said. "Can't anybody tell me where to find my little gal?"

A rough-looking young fellow pointed in perfect silence through the smoke.

"I'll have her out yet. I'm an old man, but I can help. She's my little gal, ye see. Hand me that there dipper of water; it'll keep her from choking, may be. Now! Keep cheery, Sene! Your old father'll get ye out. Keep up good heart, child! That's it!"

"It's no use, father. Don't feel bad, father. I don't mind it very much."

He hacked at the timber; he tried to laugh; he bewildered himself with cheerful words.

"No more ye needn't, Senath, for it'll be over in a minute. Don't be downcast yet! We'll have ye safe at home before ye know it. Drink a little more water,—do now! They'll get at ye now, sure!"

But above the crackle and the roar a woman's voice rang out like a bell:—

"We're going home, to die no more."

A child's notes quavered in the chorus. From sealed and unseen graves, white young lips swelled the glad refrain,—

"We're going, going home."

The crawling smoke turned yellow, turned red. Voice after voice broke and hushed utterly. One only sang on like silver. It flung defiance down at death. It chimed into the lurid sky without a tremor. For one stood beside her in the furnace, and his form was like unto the form of the Son of God. Their eyes met. Why should not Asenath sing?

"Senath!" cried the old man out upon the burning bricks; he was scorched now, from his gray hair to his patched boots.

The answer came triumphantly,—

"To die no more, no more, no more!"

"Sene! little Sene!"

But some one pulled him back.



Night-Watches.



Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good-natured. She thinks it necessary to make this statement, lest, after having heard her story, you should, however polite you might be about it, in your heart of hearts suspect her capable not only of allowing her angry passions to rise, but of permitting them to boil over "in tempestuous fury wild and unrestrained." If it were an orthodox remark, she would also add, from like motives of self-defence, that she is not in the habit of swearing.

Are you accustomed, O tender-hearted reader, to spend your nights, as a habit, with your eyes open or shut? On the answer to this question depends her sole hope of appreciation and sympathy.

She begs you will understand that she does not mean you, the be-ribboned and be-spangled and be-rouged frequenter of ball and soiree, with your well-taught, drooping lashes, or wide girl's eyes untamed and wondering, your flushing color, and your pulse up to a hundred. You are very pretty for your pains,—O, to be sure you are very pretty! She has not the heart to scold you, though you are dancing and singing and flirting away your golden nights, your restful, young nights, that never come but once,—though you are dancing and singing and flirting yourselves merrily into your grave. She would like to put in a plea before the eloquence of which Cicero and Demosthenes, Beecher and Sumner, should pale like wax-lights before the sun, for the new fashion said to be obtaining in New York, that the soiree shall give place to the matinee, at which the guests shall assemble at four o'clock in the afternoon, and are expected to go home at seven or eight. That would be not only civilized, it would be millennial.

But Keturah is perfectly aware that you will do as you will. If the excitement of the "wee sma' hours ayont the twal" prove preferable to a quiet evening at home, and a good, Christian, healthy sleep after it, why the "sma' hours" it will be. If you will do it, it is "none of her funerals," as the small boy remarked. Only she particularly requests you not to insult her by offering her your sympathy. Wait till you know what forty-eight mortal, wide-awake, staring, whirring, unutterable hours mean.

Listen to her mournful tale; and, while you listen, let your head become fountains of water, and your eyes rivers of tears for her, and for all who are doomed to reside in her immediate vicinity.

"Tired nature's sweet restorer," as the newspapers, in a sudden and severe poetical attack, remarked of Jeff Davis, "refuses to bless" Keturah, except as her own sweet will inclines her. They have a continuous lover's quarrel, exceedingly bitter while it rages, exceedingly sweet when it is made up. Keturah attends a perfectly grave and unimpeachable lecture,—the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff for twenty-four hours. Keturah undertakes at seven o'clock a concert,— announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore's Brassiest,—and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o'clock, A. M. Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face; and comes home at eight o'clock to the pleasing discovery that the fair enslaver has taken some doctrinal offence, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she's still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she has learned at the school of a melancholy experience. A table and a kerosene lamp are brought into requisition; also a book. If it isn't the Dictionary, it is Cruden's Concordance. If these prove too exciting, it is Edwards on the Will. Light reading is strictly forbidden. Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F. Tupper, and somebody's "Sphere of Woman."

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will produce drowsiness. There are nine probabilities to the contrary. The possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for; but if it results in the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe banging of the "Sphere of Woman" against the wall, and the total disappearance of Cruden's Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in the least surprised. It is altogether too familiar a result to elicit remark. It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day she will write a book. The publishers shall nap over it, and accept it with pleasure. The drowsy printers shall set up its type with their usual unerring exactness. The proof-readers shall correct it in their dreams. Customers in the bookstores shall nod at the sight of its binding. Its readers shall dose at its Preface. Sleepless old age, sharp and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out, shall flock unto the counters of its fortunate publishers (she has three firms in her mind's eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent. Physicians from everywhere under the sun, who have proved the fickleness of hyoscyamus, of hops, of Dover's powders, of opium, of morphine, of laudanum, of hidden virtues of herbs of the field, and minerals from the rock, and gases from the air; who know the secrets of all the pitying earth, and, behold, it is vanity of vanities, shall line their hospitals, cram their offices, stuff their bottles, with the new universal panacea and blessing to suffering humanity.

And Keturah can keep a resolution.

Her literary occupation disposed of, in the summary manner referred to, she runs through the roll of her reserve force, and their name is Legion. She composes herself, in an attitude of rest, with a handkerchief tied over her eyes to keep them shut, blows her lamp out instead of screwing it out, strangles awhile in the gas, and begins to repeat her alphabet, which, owing to like stern necessity, she has fortunately never forgotten. She says it forward; she says it backward; she begins at the middle and goes up; she begins at the middle and goes down; she rattles it through in French, she groans it through in German, she falters it through in Greek. She attempts the numeration-table, flounders somewhere in the quadrillions, and forgets where she left off. She watches an interminable flock of sheep jump over a wall till her head spins. There always seem to be so many more where the last one came from. She listens to oar-beats, and drum-beats, and heart-beats. She improvises sonatas and gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She perpetrates the title and first line of an epic poem, goes through the alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats the first line by way of encouragement. But all in vain.

With a silence that speaks unspeakable things, she rises solemnly, and seeks the pantry in darkness that may be felt. At the bottom of the stairs she steps with her whole weight flat upon something that squirms, and is warm, and turns over, and utters a cry that makes night hideous. O, nothing but the cat, that is all! The pantry proves to be well stocked with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if there is anything Keturah particularly dislikes, it is dry bread. Accordingly, with a remark which is intended for Love's ear alone, she gropes her way to the cellar door, which is unexpectedly open, pitches head-first into the cavity, and makes the descent of half the stairs in an easy and graceful manner, chiefly with her elbows. She reaches the ground after an interval, steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop, and embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms. After a little wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the ignis fatuus of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between an alligator and a jaguar. She stands her ground manfully, however, and is happy to state that she did not faint.

In the agitation consequent upon this incident she butters her bread with the lard, and takes an enormous bite on the way up stairs. She seeks no more refreshment that night.

One resort alone is left. With a despairing sigh she turns the great faucet of the bath-tub and holds her head under it till she is upon the verge of a watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope. Perhaps about three or four o'clock she falls into a series of jerky naps, and dreams that she is editor of a popular Hebrew magazine, wandering frantically through a warehouse full of aspirant MSS. (chiefly from the junior classes of theological seminaries) of which she cannot translate a letter.

Of the tenth of Keturah's unearthly experiences,—of the number of times she has been taken for a robber, and chased by the entire roused and bewildered family, with loaded guns; of the pans of milk she has upset, the crockery whose hopes she has untimely shattered, the skulls she has cracked against open doors, the rocking-chairs she has stumbled over and apostrophized in her own meek way; of the neighbors she has frightened out of town by her perambulations; of the alarms of fire she has raised, pacing the wood-shed with a lantern for exercise stormy nights; of all the possible and impossible corners and crevices in which she has sought repose, (she has slept on every sofa in every room in the house, and once she spent a whole night on a closet shelf); of the amiable condition of her mornings, and the terror she is fast becoming to family. Church, and State, the time would fail her to tell. Were she to "let slip the dogs of war," and relate a modicum of the agonies she undergoes,—how the stamping of a neighbor's horse on a barn floor will drive every solitary wink of sleep from her eyes and slumber from her eyelids; the nibbling of a mouse in some un-get-at-able place in the wall prove torture; the rattling of a pane of glass, ticking of a clock, or pattering of rain-drops, as effective as a cannon; a guest in the "spare room" with a musical "love of a baby," something far different from a blessing, and a tolerably windy night, one lengthened vigil long drawn out,—the liberal public would cry, "Forbear!" It becomes really an interesting science to learn how slight a thing will utterly deprive an unfortunate creature of the great necessity of life; but this article not being a scientific treatise, that must be left to the sympathizing imagination.

Keturah feels compelled, however, to relate the story of two memorable nights, of which the only wonder is that she has lived to tell the tale.

Every incident is stamped indelibly upon her brain. It is wrought in letters of fire. "While memory holds a seat in this distracted globe," it shall not, cannot be forgotten.

It was a night in June,—sultry, gasping, fearful. Keturah went to her own room, as is her custom, at the Puritanic hour of nine. Sleep, for a couple of hours, being out of the question, she threw wide her doors and windows, and betook herself to her writing-desk. A story for a magazine, which it was imperative should be finished to-morrow, appealed to her already partially stupefied brain. She forced her unwilling pen into the service, whisked the table round into the draught, and began. In about five minutes the sibyl caught the inspiration of her god, and heat and sleeplessness were alike forgotten. This sounds very poetic, but it wasn't at all. Keturah regrets to say that she had on a very unbecoming green wrapper, and several ink-spots on her fingers.

It was a very thrilling and original story, and it came, as all thrilling and original stories must come, to a crisis. Seraphina found Theodore kissing the hand of Celeste in the woods. Keturah became excited.

"'O Theodore!' whispered the unhappy maiden to the moaning trees. 'O Theodore, my—'"

Whir! buzz! swosh! came something through the window into the lamp, and down squirming into the ink-bottle. Keturah jumped. If you have half the horror of those great June beetles that she has, you will know how she jumped. She emptied the entire contents of the ink-bottle out of the window, closed her blinds, and began again.

"'Theodore,' said Seraphina.

"'Seraphina,' said Theodore." Jump the second! There he was,—not Theodore, but the beetle,—whirring round the lamp, and buzzing down into her lap. Hadn't he been burned in the light, drowned in the ink, speared with the pen, and crushed by falling from the window? Yet there he was, or the ghost of him, fluttering his inky wings into her very eyes, and walking leisurely across the smooth, fair page that waited to be inscribed with Seraphina's woe. Nerved by despair, Keturah did a horrible thing. Never before or since has she been known to accomplish it. She put him down on the floor and stepped on him. She repented of the act in dust and ashes. Before she could get across the room to close the window ten more had come to his funeral. To describe the horrors of the ensuing hour she has no words. She put them out of the window,—they came directly back. She drowned them in the wash-bowl,—they fluttered, and sputtered, and buzzed up into the air. She killed them in corners,—they came to life under her very eyes. She caught them in her handkerchief and tied them up tight,—they crawled out before she could get them in. She shut the cover of the wash-stand down on them,—she looked in awhile after and there was not one to be seen. All ten of the great blundering creatures were knocking their brains out against the ceiling. After the endurance of terrors that came very near turning her hair gray, she had pushed the last one out on the balcony, shut the window, and was gasping away in the airless room, her first momentary sense of security, when there struck upon her agonized ear a fiendish buzzing, and three of them came whirling back through a crack about as large as a knitting-needle. No mortal beetle could have come through it. Keturah turned pale and let them alone.

The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at last restored, and the exhausted sufferer began to think of sleep. At this moment she heard a sound before which her heart sank like lead. You must know that Keturah has a very near neighbor, Miss Humdrum by name. Miss Humdrum is a—well, a very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed servant and three cats; and the sound which Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum's cats.

Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself with a huge oaken log, and sallied out into the garden, with a horrible sang-froid that only long familiarity with her errand could have engendered. It was Egyptian darkness; but her practised eye discerned, or thought it discerned, a white cat upon the top of the high wooden fence. Keturah smiled a ghastly smile, and fired. Now she never yet in her life threw anything anywhere, under any circumstances, that did not go exactly in the opposite direction from what she wanted to have it. This occasion proved no exception. The cat jumped, and sprang over, and disappeared. The stick went exactly into the middle of the fence. Keturah cannot suppose that the last trump will be capable of making a louder noise. She stood transfixed. One cry alone broke the hideous silence.

"O Lord!" in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened howl, from the open window of the one-eyed servant's room. "Only that, and nothing more."

Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not a wiser woman. Marius among the ruins of Carthage, Napoleon at St. Helena, M'Clellan in Europe, have henceforth and forever her sympathy.

She thinks it was precisely five minutes after her return, during which the happy stillness that seemed to rest upon nature without and nature within had whispered faint promises of coming rest, that there suddenly broke upon it a hoarse, deep, unearthly breathing. So hoarse, so deep, so unearthly, and so directly underneath her window, that for about ten seconds Keturah sat paralyzed. There was but one thing it could be. A travelling menagerie in town had lost its Polish wolf that very day. This was the Polish wolf.

The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished creature, came nearer, grew louder, grew hoarser. The animal had found a bone in the grass, and was crunching it in his ghastly way. Then she could hear him sniffing at the door.

And Amram's room was on the lower story! Perhaps wolves climbed in at windows!

The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor of her terror. She was no coward. She would face the fearful sight. She would call and warn him at any risk. She faltered out upon the balcony. She leaned over the railing. She gazed breathlessly down into the darkness.

A cow.

Another cow.

Three cows.

Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of despair.

It was succeeded by a storm. She concludes that she was about five seconds on the passage from her room to the garden. With "hair flotant, and arms disclosed," like the harpies of heraldic device, she rushed up to the invaders—and stopped. Exactly what was to be done? Three great stupid, browsing, contented cows versus one lone, lorn woman. For about one minute Keturah would not have wagered her fortune on the woman. But it is not her custom to "say die," and after some reflection she ventured on a manful command.

"Go away! Go! go!" The stentorian remark caused a result for which she was, to say the least, unprepared. The creatures coolly turned about and walked directly up to her. To be sure. Why not? Is it not a part of our outrageous Yankee nomenclature to teach cows to come to you when you tell them to go away? How Keturah, country born and bred, could have even momentarily forgotten so clear and simple a principle of philology, remains a mystery to this day. A little reflection convinced her of the only logical way of ridding herself of her guests. Accordingly, she walked a little way behind them and tried again.

"Come here, sir! Come, good fellow! Wh-e-e! come here!"

Three great wooden heads lifted themselves slowly, and three pairs of soft, sleepy eyes looked at her, and the beasts returned to their clover and stood stock-still.

What was to be done? You could go behind and push them. Or you could go in front and pull them by the horns.

Neither of these methods exactly striking Keturah's fancy, she took up a little chip and threw at them; also a piece of coal and a handful of pebbles. These gigantic efforts proving to be fruitless, she sat down on the grass and looked at them. The heartless creatures resisted even that appeal.

At this crisis of her woes one of Keturah's many brilliant thoughts came to her relief. She hastened upon the wings of the wind to her infallible resort, the wood-shed, and filled her arms up to the chin with pine knots. Thus equipped, she started afresh to the conflict. It is recorded that out of twenty of those sticks, thrown with savage and direful intent, only one hit. It is, however, recorded that the enemy dispersed, after being valiantly pursued around the house, out of the front gate (where one stuck, and got through with the greatest difficulty), and for a quarter of a mile down the street. In the course of the rout Keturah tripped on her dress only six times, and fell flat but four. One pleasing little incident gave delightful variety to the scene. A particularly frisky and clover-loving white cow, whose heart yearned after the apples of Sodom, turned about in the road without any warning whatever and showed fight. Keturah adopted a sudden resolution to return home "across lots," and climbed the nearest stone-wall with considerable empressement. Exactly half-way over she was surprised to find herself gasping among the low-hanging boughs of a butternut-tree, where she hung like Absalom of old, between heaven and earth. She would like to state, in this connection, that she always had too much vanity to wear a waterfall; so she still retains a portion of her original hair.

However, she returned victorious over the silent dew-laden fields and down into the garden paths, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circumstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her, that exercise unto exhaustion was her sole remaining hope of sleep.

At about two o'clock she crawled faintly upstairs again, and had just fallen asleep with her head on the window-sill, when a wandering dog had to come directly under the window, and sit there and bark for half an hour at a rake-handle.

Keturah made no other effort to fight her destiny. Determined to meet it heroically, she put a chair precisely into the middle of the room, and sat up straight in it, till she heard the birds sing. Somewhere about that epoch she fell into a doze with one eye open, when a terrific peal of thunder started her to her feet. It was Patsy knocking at the door to announce that her breakfast was cold.

In the ghastly condition of the following day the story was finished and sent off. It was on this occasion that the patient and long-enduring editor ventured mildly to suggest, that when, by a thrilling and horrible mischance, Seraphina's lovely hand came between a log of wood and the full force of Theodore's hatchet, the result might have been more disastrous than the loss of a finger-nail. Alas! even his editorial omniscience did not know—how could it?—the story of that night. Keturah forgave him.

It is perhaps worthy of mention that Miss Humdrum appeared promptly at eight o'clock the next morning, with her handkerchief at her eyes.

"My Star-spangled Banner has met with her decease, Ketury."

"Indeed! How very sad!"

"Yes. She has met with her decease. Under very peculiar circumstances, Ketury."

"Oh!" said Ketury, hunting for her own handkerchief; finding three in her pocket, she brought them all into requisition.

"And I feel it my duty to inquire," said Miss Humdrum, "whether it may happen that you know anything about the event, Ketury."

"I?" said Keturah, weeping, "I didn't know she was dead even! Dear Miss Humdrum, you are indeed afflicted."

"But I feel compelled to say," pursued Miss Humdrum, eying this wretched hypocrite severely, "that my girl Jemimy did hear somebody fire a gun or a cannon or something out in your garden last night, and she scar't out of her wits, and my poor cat found cold under the hogshead this morning, Ketury."

"Miss Humdrum," said Keturah, "I cannot, in justice to myself, answer such insinuations, further than to say that Amram never allows the gun to go out of his own room. The cannon we keep in the cellar."

"Oh!" said Miss Humdrum, with horrible suspicion in her eyes. "Well, I hope you haven't it on your conscience, I'm sure. Good morning."

It had been the ambition of Keturah's life to see a burglar. The second of the memorable nights referred to crowned this ambition by not only one burglar, but two. She it was who discovered them, she who frightened them away, and nobody but she ever saw them. She confesses to a natural and unconquerable pride in them. It came about on this wise:—

It was one of Keturah's wide-awake nights, and she had been wandering off into the fields at the foot of the garden, where it was safe and still. There is, by the way, a peculiar awe in the utter hush of the earliest morning hours, of which no one can know who has not familiarized himself with it in all its moods. A solitary walk in a solitary place, with the great world sleeping about you, and the great skies throbbing above you, and the long unrest of the panting summer night, fading into the cool of dews, and pure gray dawns, has in it something of what Mr. Robertson calls "God's silence."

Once, on one of these lonely rambles, Keturah found away in the fields, under the shadow of an old stone-wall, a baby's grave. It had no headstone to tell its story, and the weeds and brambles of many years had overgrown it. Keturah is not of a romantic disposition, especially on her midnight tramps, but she sat down by the little nameless thing, and looked from it to the arch of eternal stars that, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, kept steadfast watch over it, and was very still.

It is one of the standing grievances of her life that Amram, while never taking the trouble to go and look, insists upon it that was nothing but somebody's pet dog. She knows better.

On this particular night, Keturah, in coming up from the garden to return to the house, had a dim impression that something crossed the walk in front of her and disappeared among the rustling trees. The impression was sufficiently strong to keep her sitting up for half an hour at her window, under the feeling that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. She has indeed been asked why she did not reconnoitre the rustling trees upon the spot. She considers that would have been an exceedingly poor stroke of policy, and of an impolitic thing Keturah is not capable. She sees far and plans deep. Supposing she had gone and been shot through the head, where would have been the fun of her burglars? To yield a life-long aspiration at the very moment that it is within grasp, was too much to ask even of Keturah.

Words cannot describe the sensations of the moment, when that half-hour was rewarded by the sight of two stealthy, cat-like figures, creeping out from among the trees. A tall man and a little man, and both with very unbanditti-like straw-hats on.

Now, if Keturah has a horror in this world, it is that delicate play of the emotions commonly known as "woman's nonsense." And therefore did she sit still for three mortal minutes, with her burglars making tracks for the kitchen window under her very eyes, in order to prove to herself and an incredulous public, beyond all shadow of doubt or suspicion, that they were robbers and not dreams; actual flesh and blood, not nightmares; unmistakable hats and coats in a place where hats and coats ought not to be, not clothes-lines and pumps. She tried hard to make Amram and the Paterfamilias out of them. Who knew but they also, by some unheard-of revolution in all the laws of nature, were on an exploring expedition after truant sleep? She struggled manfully after the conviction that they were innocent and unimpeachable neighbors, cutting the short way home across the fields from some remarkably late prayer-meeting. She agonized after the belief that they were two of Patsy's sweethearts, come for the commendable purpose of serenading her.

In fact they were almost in the house before this remarkable female was prepared to trust the evidence of her own senses.

But when suspense gloomed into certainty, Keturah is happy to say that she was grandly equal to the occasion. She slammed open her blinds with an emphasis, and lighted her lamp with a burnt match.

The men jumped, and dodged, and ran, and hid behind the trees, in the most approved manner of burglars, who flee when no woman pursueth; and Keturah, being of far too generous a disposition to enjoy the pleasure of their capture unshared, lost no time in hammering at Amram's door.

"Amram!"

No answer.

"Amram!"

Silence.

"Am-ram!"

"Oh! Ugh! Who—"

Silence again.

"Amram, wake up! Come out here—quick!"

"O-o-oh, yes. Who's there?"

"I."

"I?"

"Keturah."

"Kefurah?"

"Amram, be quick, or we shall all have our throats cut! There are some men in the garden."

"Hey?"

"Men in the garden!"

"Men?"

"In the garden!"

"Garden?"

Keturah can bear a great deal, but there comes a limit even to her proverbial patience. She burst open the door without ceremony, and is under the impression that Amram received a shaking such as even his tender youth was a stranger to. It effectually woke him to consciousness, as well as to the gasping and particularly senseless remark, "What on earth was she wringing his neck for?" As if he mightn't have known! She has the satisfaction of remembering that he was asked in return, "Did he expect a solitary unprotected female to keep all his murderers away from him, as well as those wolves she drove off the other night?"

However, there was no time to be wasted in tender words, and before a woman could have winked, Amram made his appearance dressed and armed and sarcastically incredulous. Keturah grasped the pistol, and followed him at a respectful distance. Stay in the house and hold the light? Catch her! She would take the light with her, and the house too, if necessary, but she would be in at the death.

She wishes Mr. Darley were on hand, to immortalize the picture they made, scouring the premises after those disobliging burglars,—especially Keturah, in the green wrapper, with her hair rolled all up in a huge knob on top of her head, to keep it out of the way, and her pistol held out at arm's-length, pointed falteringly, directly at the stars. She will inform the reader confidentially—tell it not in Gath—of a humiliating discovery she made exactly four weeks afterward, and which she has never before imparted to a human creature,—it wasn't loaded.

Well, they peered behind every door, they glared into every shadow, they squeezed into every crack, they dashed into every corner, they listened at every cranny and crevice, step and turn. But not a burglar! Of course not. A regiment might have run away while Amram was waking up.

Keturah thinks it will hardly be credited that this hopeful person dared to suggest and dares to maintain that it was Cats!

But she must draw the story of her afflictions to a close. And lest her "solid" reader's eyes reject the rambling recital as utterly unworthy the honor of their notice, she is tempted to whittle it down to a moral before saying farewell. For you must know that Keturah has learned several things from her mournful experience.

1. That every individual of her acquaintance, male and female, aged and youthful, orthodox and heretical, who sleeps regularly nine hours out of the twenty-four, has his or her own especial specimen recipe of a "perfectly harmless anodyne" to offer, with advice thrown in.

2. That nothing ever yet put her to sleep but a merciful Providence.

3. A great respect for Job.

4. That the notion commonly and conscientiously received by very excellent people, that wakeful nights can and should be spent in prayer, religious meditation, and general spiritual growth, is all they know about it. Hours of the extremest bodily and mental exhaustion, when every nerve is quivering as if laid bare, and the surface of the brain burning and whirling to agony, with the reins of control let loose on every rebellious and every senseless thought, are not the times most likely to be chosen for the purest communion with God. To be sure. King David "remembered Him upon his bed, and meditated upon Him in the night-watches." Keturah does not undertake to contradict Scripture, but she has come to the conclusion that David was either a very good man, or he didn't lie awake very often.

But, over and above all, haec fabula docet:

5. That people who can sleep when they want to should keep Thanksgiving every day in the year.



The Day of My Death[1]

[Footnote 1: The characters in this narrative are fictitious. The incidents the author does not profess to have witnessed. But they are given as related by eye-witnesses whose testimony would command a verdict from any honest jury. The author, however, draws no conclusions and suggests none.]



Alison was sitting on a bandbox. She had generally been sitting on a bandbox for three weeks,—or on a bushel-basket, or a cupboard shelf, or a pile of old newspapers, or the baby's bath-tub. On one occasion it was the baby himself. She mistook him for the rag-bag.

If ever we had to move again,—which all the beneficence of the Penates forbid!—my wife should be locked into the parlor, and a cargo of Irishwomen turned loose about the premises to "attend to things." What it is that women find to do with themselves in this world I have never yet discovered. They are always "attending to things." Whatever that may mean, I have long ago received it as the only solution at my command of their superfluous wear and tear, and worry and flurry, and tears and nerves and headaches. A fellow may suggest Jane, and obtrude Bridget, and hire Peggy, and run in debt for Mehetable, and offer to take the baby on 'Change with him, but has he by a feather's weight lightened Madam's mysterious burden? My dear sir, don't presume to expect it. She has just as much to do as she ever had. In fact, she has a little more. "Strange, you don't appreciate it! Follow her about one day, and see for yourself!"

What I started to say, however, was that I thought it over often,—I mean about that invoice of Irishwomen,—coming home from the office at night, while we were moving out of Artichoke Street into Nemo's Avenue. It is not pleasant to find one's wife always sitting on a bandbox. I have seen her crawl to her feet when she heard me coming, and hold on by a chair, and try her poor little best to look as if she could stand twenty-four hours longer; she so disliked that I should find a "used-up looking house" under any circumstances. But I believe that was worse than the bandbox.

On this particular night she was too tired even to crawl. I found her all in a heap in the corner, two dusters and a wash-cloth in one blue-veined hand, and a broom in the other; an old corn-colored silk handkerchief knotted over her hair,—her hair is black, and the effect was good,—and her little brown calico aprong-string literally tied to the baby, who was shrieking at the end of his tether because he could just not reach the kitten and throw her into the fire. On Alison's lap, between a pile of shirts and two piles of magazines, lay a freshly opened letter. I noticed that she put it into her pocket before she dropped her dusters and stood up to lift her face for my kiss. She forgot about the apron-strings, and the baby tipped up the wrong way, and hung dangling in mid-air.

After we had taken tea,—that is to say, after we had drawn around the ironing-board put on two chairs in the front entry, made the cocoa in a tin dipper, stirred it with a fork, and cut the bread with a jack-knife,—after the baby was fairly off to bed in a champagne-basket, and Tip disposed of, his mother only knew where, we coaxed a consumptive fire into the parlor grate, and sat down before it in the carpetless, pictureless, curtainless, blank, bare, soapy room.

"Thank fortune, this is the last night of it!" I growled, putting my booted feet against the wall, (my slippers had gone over to the avenue in a water-pail that morning,) and tipping my chair back drearily,—my wife "so objects" to the habit!

Allis made no reply, but sat looking thoughtfully, and with a slightly perplexed and displeased air, into the sizzling wet wood that snapped and flared and smoked and hissed and blackened, and did everything but burn.

"I really don't know what to do about it," she broke silence at last.

"I'm inclined to think there's nothing better to do than to look at it."

"No; not the fire. O, I forgot—I haven't shown it to you."

She drew from her pocket the letter which I had noticed in the afternoon, and laid it upon my knee. With my hands in my pockets—the room was too cold to take them out—I read:—

Dear Cousin Alison:—

"I have been so lonely since mother died, that my health, never of the strongest, as you know, has suffered seriously. My physician tells me that something is wrong with the periphrastic action, if you know what that is," [I suppose Miss Fellows meant the peristaltic action,] "and prophesies something dreadful, (I've forgotten whether it was to be in the head, or the heart, or the stomach,) if I cannot have change of air and scene this winter. I should dearly love to spend some time with you in your new home, (I fancy it will be drier than the old one,) if convenient to you. If inconvenient, don't hesitate to say so, of course. I hope to hear from you soon.

"In haste, your aff. cousin,

"Gertrude Fellows.

"P.S.—I shall of course insist upon being a boarder if I come.

"G.F."

"Hum-m. Insipid sort of letter."

"Exactly. That's Gertrude. No more flavor than a frozen pear. If she had one distinguishing peculiarity, good or bad, I believe I should like her better. But I'm sorry for the woman."

"Sorry enough to stand a winter of her?"

"If we hadn't just been through this moving! A new house and all,—nobody knows how the flues are yet, or whether we can heat a spare room. She hasn't had a home, though, since Cousin Dorothy died. But I was thinking about you, you see."

"O, she can't hurt me. She won't want the library, I suppose; nor my slippers, and the small bootjack. Let her come."

My wife sighed a small sigh of relief out from the depths of her hospitable heart, and the little matter was settled and dismissed as lightly as are most little matters out of which grow the great ones.

I had just begun to dream that night that Gertrude Fellows, in the shape of a large wilted pear, had walked in and sat down on a dessert plate, when Allis gave me a little pinch and woke me.

"My dear, Gertrude has one peculiarity. I never thought of it till this minute."

"Confound Gertrude's peculiarities! I want to go to sleep. Well, let's have it."

"Why, you see, she took up with some Spiritualistic notions after her mother's death; thought she held communications with her, and all that, Aunt Solomon says."

"Stuff and nonsense!"

"Of course. But, Fred, dear, I'm inclined to think she must have made her sewing-table walk into the front entry; and Aunt Solomon says the spirits rapped out the whole of Cousin Dorothy's history on the mantel-piece, behind those blue china vases,—you must have noticed them at the funeral,—and not a human hand within six feet."

"Alison Hotchkiss!" I said, waking thoroughly, and sitting up in bed to emphasize the opinion, "when I hear a spirit rap on my mantel-piece, and see my tables walk about the front entry, I'll believe that,—not before!"

"O, I know it! I'm not a Spiritualist, I'm sure, and nothing would tempt me to be. But still that sort of reasoning has a flaw in it, hasn't it, dear? The King of Siam, you know—"

I had heard of the King of Siam before, and I politely informed my wife that I did not care to hear of him again. Spiritualism was a system of refined jugglery. Just another phase of the same thing which brings the doves out of Mr. Hermann's empty hat. It might be entertaining if it had not become such an abominable imposition. There would always be nervous women and hypochondriac men enough for its dupes. I thanked Heaven that I was neither, and went to sleep.

Our new house was light and dry; the flues worked well, and the spare chamber heated admirably. The baby exchanged the champagne-basket for his dainty pink-curtained crib; Tip began to recover from the perpetual cold with which three weeks' sitting in draughts, and tumbling into water-pails, and playing in the sink, had sweetened his temper; Allis forsook her bandboxes for the crimson easy-chair (very becoming, that chair), or tripped about on her own rested feet; we returned to table-cloths, civilized life, and a fork apiece.

In short, nothing at all worth mentioning happened, till that one night,—I think it was our first Sunday,—when Allis waked me at twelve o'clock with the announcement that some one was knocking at the door. Supposing it to be Bridget with the baby,—croup, probably, or a fit,—I unlocked and unlatched it promptly. No one was there, however; and telling my wife, in no very gentle tone, if I remember correctly, that it would be a convenience, on such cold nights, if she could keep her dreams to herself, I shut the door distinctly and returned to my own.

In the morning I observed a little white circle about each of Allis's blue eyes, and after some urging she confessed to me that her sleep had been much broken by a singular disturbance in the room. I might laugh at her if I chose, and she had not meant to tell me, but somebody had rapped in that room all night long.

"On the door?"

"On the door, on the mantel, on the foot of the bed, on the head-board,—Fred, right on the head-board! I listened till I grew cold listening, but it rapped and it rapped, and by and by it was morning, and it stopped."

"Rats!" said I.

"Then rats have knuckles," said she.

"Mice!" said I, "wind! broken plaster! crickets! imagination! dreams! fancies! blind headache! nonsense! Next time wake me up, and fire pillows at me till I'm pleasant to you. Now I'll have a kiss and a cup of coffee. Any sugar in it?"

Tip fell down the cellar stairs that day, and the baby swallowed a needle and two gutta-percha buttons, which I had been waiting a week to have sewed on my vest, so that Alison had enough else to think about, and the little incident of the raps was forgotten. I believe it was not recalled by either of us till after Gertrude Fellows came.

It was on a Monday and in a drizzly storm that I brought her from the station. She was a thin, cold, phantom-like woman, shrouded in water-proofs and green barege veils. Why is it that homely women always wear green barege veils? She did not improve in appearance when her wraps were off, and she was seated by my parlor grate. Her large green eyes had no speculation in them. Her mouth—an honest mouth, that was one mercy—quivered and shrank when she was addressed suddenly, as if she felt herself to be a sort of foot-ball that the world was kicking about at pleasure,—your gentlest smile might prove a blow. She seldom spoke unless she were spoken to, and fell into long reveries, with her eyes on the window or the coals. She wore a horrible sort of ruff,—"illusion," I think Allis called it,—which, of all contrivances that she could have chosen to encircle her sallow neck, was exactly the most unbecoming. She was always knitting blue stockings,—I never discovered for what or whom; and she wore her lifeless hair in the shape of a small toy cartwheel, on the back of her head.

However, she brightened a little in the course of the first week, helped Alison about the baby, kept herself out of my way, read her Bible and the "Banner of Light" in about equal proportion, and became a mild, inoffensive, and, on the whole, not unpleasant addition to the family.

She had been in the house about ten days, I think, when Alison, with a disturbed face, confided to me that she had spent another wakeful night with those "rats" behind the head-board; I had been down with a sick-headache the day before, and she had not wakened me. I promised to set a trap and buy a cat before evening, and was closing the door upon the subject, being already rather late at the office, when the expression of Gertrude Fellows's face detained me.

"If I were you, I—wouldn't—really buy a very expensive trap, Mr. Hotchkiss. It will be a waste of money, I am afraid. I heard the noise that disturbed Cousin Alison"; and she sighed.

I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be so good as to explain herself.

"It's of no use," she said, doggedly. "You know you won't believe me. But that makes no difference. They come all the same."

"They?" asked Allis, smiling. "Do you mean some of your spirits?"

The cold little woman flushed. "These are not my spirits. I know nothing about them. I did not mean to obtrude a subject so disagreeable to you while I was in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in which the Influences were so strong. I don't know what they mean, nor anything about them, but just that they're here. They wake me up, twitching my elbows, nearly every night."

"Wake you up how?"

"Twitching my elbows," she repeated, gravely.

I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness nor the woman's heightened color could save me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap without delay.

That night, when Miss Fellows had "retired,"—she never "went to bed" in simple English like other people,—I stole softly out in my stockings and screwed a little brass button outside of her door. I had made a gimlet-hole for it in the morning when our guest was out shopping; it fitted into place without noise. Without noise I turned it, and went back to my own room.

"You suspect her, then?" said Alison.

"One is always justified in suspecting a Spiritualistic medium."

"I don't know about that," Allis said, decidedly. "It may have been mice that I heard last night, or the wind in a bottle, or any of the other proper and natural causes that explain away the ghost stories in the children's papers; but it was not Gertrude. Women know something about one another, my dear; and I tell you it was not Gertrude."

"I don't assert that it was; but with the bolt on Gertrude's door, the cat in the kitchen, and the rat-trap on the garret stairs, I am strongly inclined to anticipate a peaceful night. I will watch for a while, however, and you can go to sleep."

She went to sleep, and I watched. I lay till half past eleven with my eyes staring at the dark, wide awake and undisturbed and triumphant.

At half past eleven I must confess that I heard a singular sound.

Something whistled at the keyhole. It could not have been the wind, by the way, for there was no wind that night. Something else than the wind whistled in at the keyhole, sighed through into the room as much like a long-drawn breath as anything, and fell with a slight clink upon the floor.

I lighted my candle and got up. I searched the floor of the room, and opened the door and searched the entry. Nothing was visible or audible, and I went back to bed. For about ten minutes I heard no further disturbance, and was concluding myself to be in some undefined manner the victim of my own imagination, when there suddenly fell upon the headboard of my bed a blow so distinct and loud that I involuntarily sprang at the sound of it. It wakened Alison, and I had the satisfaction of hearing her sleepily inquire if I had caught that rat yet? By way of reply I relighted the candle, and gave the bed a shove which sent it rolling half across the room. I examined the wall; I examined the floor; I examined the headboard; I made Alison get up, so that I could shake the mattresses. Meantime the pounding had recommenced, in rapid, irregular, blows, like the blows of a man's fist. The room adjoining ours was the nursery. I went in with my light. It was empty and silent. Bridget, with Tip and the baby, slept soundly in the large chamber across the hall. While I was searching the room my wife called loudly to me, and I ran back.

"It is on the mantel now," she said. "It struck the mantel just after you left; then the ceiling, three times, very loud; then the mantel again,—don't you hear?"

I heard distinctly; moreover, the mantel shook a little with the concussion. I took out the fire-board and looked up the chimney; I took out the register and looked down the furnace-pipe; I ransacked the garret and the halls; finally, I examined Miss Fellows's door,—it was locked as I had left it, upon the outside; and that locked door was the only means of egress from the room, unless the occupant fancied that of jumping from a two-story window upon a broad flight of stone steps.

I came thoughtfully back across the hall; an invisible trip-hammer appeared to hit the floor beside me at every step; I attempted to step aside from it, over it, away from it; but it followed me, pounding into my room.

"Wind?" suggested Allis. "Plaster cracking? Fancies? Dreams? Blind headaches?—I should like to know which you have decided upon?"

Quiet fell upon the house after that for an hour, and I was dropping into my first nap, when there came a light tap upon the door. Before I could reach it, it had grown into a thundering blow.

"Whatever it is I'll have it now!" I whispered, turned the latch without noise, and flung the door wide into the hall. It was silent, dark, and cold. A little glimmer of moonlight fell in and showed me the figures upon the carpet, outlined in a frosty bar. No hand or hammer, human or superhuman, was there.

Determined to investigate matters a little more thoroughly, I asked my wife to stand upon the inside of the doorway while I kept watch upon the outside. We took our position, and I closed the door between us. Instantly a series of furious blows struck the door; the sound was such as would be made by a stick of oaken wood. The solid door quivered under it.

"It's on your side!" said I.

"No, it's on yours!" said she.

"You're pounding yourself to fool me," cried I.

"You're pounding yourself to frighten me," sobbed she.

And we nearly had a quarrel. The sound continued with more or less intermission till daybreak. Allis fell asleep, but I spent the time in appropriate reflections.

Early in the morning I removed the button from Miss Fellows's door. She never knew anything about it.

I believe, however, that I had the fairness to exculpate her in my secret heart from any trickish connection with the disturbances of that night.

"Just keep quiet about this little affair," I said to my wife; "we shall come across an explanation in time, and may never have any more of it."

We kept quiet, and for five days so did "the spirits," as Miss Fellows was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers.

The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced, from the office. Miss Fellows was writing letters in the parlor. Allis, upstairs, was sorting and putting away the weekly wash. I came into the room and sat down by the register to watch her. I always liked to watch her sitting there on the floor with the little heaps of linen and cotton stuff piled like blocks of snow about her, and her pink hands darting in and out of the uncertain sleeves that were just ready to give way in the gathers, trying the stockings' heels briskly, and testing the buttons with a little jerk.

She laid aside some under-clothing presently from the rest. "It will not be needed again this winter," she observed, "and had better go into the cedar closet." The garments, by the way, were marked and numbered in indelible ink. I heard her run over the figures in a busy, housekeeper's undertone, before carrying them into the closet. She locked the closet door, I think, for I remember the click of the key. If I remember accurately, I stepped into the hall after that to light a cigar, and Alison flitted to and fro with her clothes, dropping the baby's little white stockings every step or two, and anathematizing them daintily—within orthodox bounds, of course. In about five minutes she called me; her voice was sharp and alarmed.

"Come quick! O Fred, look here! All those clothes that I locked into the cedar closet are out here on the bed!"

"My dear wife," I blandly observed, as I sauntered into the room, "too much of Gertrude Fellows hath made thee mad. Let me see the clothes!"

She pointed to the bed. Some white clothing lay upon it, folded in an ugly way, to represent a corpse, with crossed hands.

"Is it meant for a joke, Alison? You did it yourself, I suppose!"

"Fred! I have not touched it with the tip of my little finger!"

"Gertrude, then?"

"Gertrude is in the parlor writing."

So she was. I called her up. She looked surprised and troubled.

"It must have been Bridget," I proceeded, authoritatively, "or Tip."

"Bridget is out walking with Tip and the baby. Jane is in the kitchen making pies."

"At any rate these are not the clothes which you locked into the closet, however they came here."

"The very same, Fred. See, I noticed the numbers 6 upon the stockings, 2 on the night-caps, and—"

"Give me the key," I interrupted.

She gave me the key. I went to the cedar closet and tried the door. It was locked. I unlocked it, and opened the drawer in which my wife assured me that the clothes had lain. Nothing was to be seen in it but the linen towel which neatly covered the bottom. I lifted it and shook it. The drawer was empty.

"Give me those clothes, if you please."

She brought them to me. I made in my diary a careful memorandum of their naming and numbering; placed the articles myself in the drawer,—an upper drawer, so that there could be no mistake in identifying it; locked the drawer, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the closet, put the key in my pocket; locked the door of the room in which the closet was, and put that key in my pocket.

We sat down then in the hall, all of us; Allis and Gertrude to fill the mending-basket, I to smoke and consider. I saw Tip coming home with his nurse presently, and started to go down and let him in, when a faint scream from my wife arrested me. I ran past Miss Fellows, who was sitting on the stairs, and into my room. Allis, going in to put away Tip's little plaid aprons, had stopped, rather pale, upon the threshold. Upon the bed lay some clothing, folded, as before, in rude, hideous imitation of the dead.

I took each article in turn, and compared the name and number with the names and numbers in my diary. They were identical throughout. I took the clothes, took the three keys from my pocket, unlocked the "cedar-room" door, unlocked the closet door, unlocked the upper drawer, and looked in. The drawer was empty.

To say that from this time I failed to own—to myself, if not to other people—that some mysterious influence, inexplicable by common or scientific causes, was at work in my house, would be to accuse myself of more obstinacy than even I am capable of. I propounded theory after theory, and gave it up. I arrived at conclusion upon conclusion, and threw them aside. Finally, I held my peace, ceased to talk of "rats," kept my mind in a state of passive vacancy, and narrowly and quietly watched the progress of affairs.

From the date of that escapade with the underclothes confusion reigned in our corner of Nemo's Avenue. That night neither my wife nor myself closed an eye, the house so resounded and re-echoed with the blows of unseen hammers, fists, logs, and knuckles.

Miss Fellows, too, was pale with her vigils, looked troubled, and proposed going home. This I peremptorily vetoed, determined if the woman had any connection, honest or otherwise, with the mystery, to ferret it out.

The following day, just after dinner, I was writing in the library, when a child's cry of fright and pain startled me. It seemed to come from the little yard behind the house, and I hurried thither to behold a singular sight. There was one apple-tree in the yard,—an old, stunted, crooked thing; and in that tree I found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a small stout rope. "Tied" does not express it; he was gagged, manacled, twisted, contorted, wound about, crossed and recrossed, held without a chance of motion, scarcely of breath.

"You never tied yourself up here, child?" I asked, as I cut the knots.

The question certainly was unnecessary. No juggler could have bound himself in such a fashion; scarcely, then, a four-years' child. To my continued, clear, and gentle inquiries, the boy replied, persistently and consistently, that nobody tied him there,—"not Cousin Gertrude, nor Bridget, nor the baby, nor mamma, nor Jane, nor papa, nor the black kitty"; he was "just tooken up all at once into the tree, and that was all there was about it." He "s'posed it must have been God, or something like that, did it."

Poor Tip had a hard time of it. Two days after that, while his mother and I sat discussing the incident, and the child was at play upon the floor, he suddenly threw himself at full length, writhing with pain, and begging to "have them pulled out quick!"

"Have what pulled out?" exclaimed his terrified mother. She took the child into her lap, and found that he was stuck over from head to foot with large white pins.

"We haven't so many large pins in all the house," she said as soon as he was relieved.

As she spoke the words thirty or forty small pins pierced the boy. Where they came from no one could see. How they came there no one knew. We looked, and there they were, and Tip was crying and writhing as before.

For the remainder of that winter we had scarcely a day of quiet. The rumor that "the Hotchkisses had rented a haunted house" leaked out and spread abroad. The frightened servants gave warning, and other frightened servants took their place, to leave in turn. My wife was her own cook and nursery-maid a quarter of the time. The disturbances varied in character with every week, assuming, as time went on, an importunity which, had we not quietly settled it in our own minds "not to be beaten by a noise," would have driven us from the house.

Night after night the mysterious fingers rapped at the windows, the doors, the floors, the walls. Day after day uncomfortable tricks were sprung upon us by invisible agencies. We became used to the noises, so that we slept through them easily; but many of the phenomena were so strikingly unpleasant, and so singularly unsuited to the ordinary conditions of human happiness and housekeeping, that we scarcely became—as one of our excellent deacons had a cheerful habit of exhorting us to become—"resigned."

Upon one occasion we had invited a small and select number of friends to dine. It was to be rather a recherche affair for Nemo's Avenue, and my wife had spared no painstaking to suit herself with her table. We had had a comparatively quiet house the night before, so that our cook, who had been with us three days, consented to remain till our guests had been provided for. The soup was good, the pigeons better, the bread was not sour, and Allis looked hopeful, and inclined to trust Providence for the gravies and dessert.

It was just as I had begun to carve the beef that I observed my wife suddenly pale, and a telegram from her eyes turned mine in the direction of General Popgun, who sat at her right hand. My sensations "can better be imagined than described" when I saw General Popgun's fork, untouched by any human hand, dancing a jig on his plate. He grasped it and laid it firmly down. As soon as he released his hold it leaped from the table.

"Really—aw—very singular phenomena," began the General; "very singular! I was not prepared to credit the extraordinary accounts of spiritual manifestations in this house, but—aw—Well, I must say—"

Instantly it was Pandemonium at that dinner-table. Dr. Jump's knife, Mrs. M'Ready's plate, and Colonel Hope's tumbler sprang from their places. The pigeons flew from the platter, the caster rattled and rolled, the salt-cellars bounded to and fro, and the gravies, moved by some invisible disturber, spattered all over Mrs. Elias P. Critique's moire antique.

Mortified and angered beyond endurance, I for the first time addressed the spirits,—wrenched for the moment into a profound belief that they must be spirits indeed.

"Whatever you are, and wherever you are," I shouted, bringing my hand down hard upon the table, "go out of this room and let us alone!"

The only reply was a furious mazourka of all the dishes on the table. A gentleman present, who had, as he afterward told us, studied the subject of spiritualism somewhat, very sceptically and with unsatisfactory results, observed the performance keenly, and suggested that I should try a gentler method of appeal. Whatever the agent was,—and what it was he had not yet discovered,—he had noticed repeatedly that the quiet modes of meeting it were most effective.

Rather amused, I spoke more softly, addressing the caster, and intimating in my blandest manner that I and my guests would feel under obligations if we could have the room to ourselves till after we had dined. The disturbance gradually ceased, and we had no more of it that day.