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 "Likely enough to go to the bad," Harriet retorted, sharply.

"He ain't showed no signs of it yet," the old lady rejoined, with answering spirit. "He 'pears to be doin' uncommon well. Dr. Baxter says he's makin' his mark a'ready."

"He has n't stopped being the son of his father and mother, far's I know."

"That's true enough, and I never could abide Sally Enderby. But then, folks don't always take after their fathers and mothers."

"I don't know who else they take after," cried Harriet, with as near an approach to irritability as she ever permitted herself. "Anyway, my mind's made up about Lucy. She sha'n't have anything to do with Frank Enderby, not if I have to lock her up."

Old Lady Pratt eyed her daughter an instant. It was one of the rare occasions on which she was displeased with her.

"Speakin' of takin' after your parents," she said, dryly, "you ain't one mite like your father."

The reproof was administered, and the culprit knew it.

Opposition is a great stiffener. From that time forward Harriet Spencer's determination had turned to obstinacy.

When Lucy came home a few days later, her mother, after a searching glance at her pale face, gave her a rather frosty greeting. The girl wore a deep red rose in her dress.


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 "Where did you get that rose?" Harriet asked presently, for hot-house flowers did not bloom at Jane's.

"Frank left it for me yesterday."

"Did he come 'way over to Westville on purpose to see you?"

"I don't know."

"How did he find out you were at Jane's?"

"I don't know."

"Didn't you ask him?"

"I didn't see him."

"Why not?"

"I thought it would be mean."

The inquisitor's face relaxed.

"Did Jane see him?"

"Yes 'm."

"What did she say to him?"

"I don't know. She said she made it all right."

"Jane had better mind her own business," Harriet muttered.

She was suspicious of her sister's methods. Jane's had never been a well-regulated mind. But the rose was suffered to remain where it was. Lucy had certainly behaved very well, exactly as Harriet herself would have done in her place.

When she said good-night, Lucy still looked pale and tired; but there was a "grown-up," experienced look in her face which did not escape her mother.

Harriet was again struck with that curious sense of identity with her which had come over

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 her once before. "I guess it's that red rose," she said to herself, with a dreary feeling at her heart.

Harriet's devotions that evening were serious and absorbing. Long after the house was quiet she still knelt beside her bed, her head resting in her hands. Yet meek as was the attitude, her face, when she lifted it, was harder than before; the set look seemed fixed there. She put out her light and got into bed, but she could not compose herself to sleep. Hour after hour she lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness. She had ceased to think; she had ceased to resolve. She was trying, with a dull, persistent effort, not to see that red rose and the pale face above it, so like her own. The tall clock in the dining-room struck eleven and twelve. Then the minutes dragged so slowly that she hoped she had been asleep. But no; the next stroke that echoed through the empty halls was one. At two o'clock something seemed to give way within her. She got up and struck a light, and having put on her heavy flannel double-gown and slippers, she stood for a moment irresolute. She glanced furtively at the old mahogany bureau between the front windows, and then, candle in hand, she passed out into the warm hall and down the stairs. As the old timbers creaked beneath her feet she paused, and cast a guilty look over her shoulder. "If this isn't perfectly ridiculous!" she said to herself, with strong disapproval. But she pursued her way still more cautiously.


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 HOW THE JEWISH SONG TRUST MAKES* YOU SING 81

the "one play a week" plan has been smashed to smithereens. To get the people to pay their money every day, the programs are changed every day ; and to get new plays every day, something must be cheapened. So with songs. The output is rushed to increase the income of money, and quality is sacrificed all round. There are not enough good songs in the world to supply a new one every week; not enough good plays in the world to supply a new movie every day; and so, what the songs and plays lack in worth, they make up in nastiness. In brief, nastiness is the constant quality on which the producers depend to "put across" mediocre songs and" otherwise pointless plays. Nastiness is the condiment that goes with cheapness in songs and movies.

Plagiarism is the result of mediocre artists being spurred on by non-artistic promoters to produce something that can be dressed up with sufficient attractiveness to draw the public's money. But even plagiarism requires a little brains mixed with it, and when the rush of demand overwhelms the available brains, the lack is covered up by an elaborate covering of sensualism.

Men who are on the inside of the popular song business, and certain court records, all testify to the exact truth of these statements.

"But how do the Jews do it ?" is a question often asked. The answer is, not public demand, nor artistic merit, nor musical ingenuity, nor poetic worthno ; the answer is simple salesmanship. The public doesn't choose, the public simply takes what is persistently thrust upon it. It is a system impossible to any other race but the Jews, for there is no other race that centers its whole interest on the sale. There is no other race that makes so startling a choice in favor of "getting" money to the exclusion of "making" money. Who for a moment would think seriously of using the terms "production" and "service" with reference to popular songs or motion pictures? Motion pictures in their higher reaches might have some claim on those terms not the


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 Arrived below she went about from room to room feeling the window fastenings. Yet she had secured them all herself, and Harriet Spencer was the last woman to doubt her own thoroughness. The long parlor was dim and shadowy in the flickering candle-light, and her own figure seen in the pier-glass as she came down the room had a ghostly look. She turned her eyes away from the glass, and was glad to go out into the hall.

In the kitchen she examined the bread, which had been set to rise. It was doing its duty bravely. The gray kitten, curled up in its little basket beside the stove, opened one eye upon the intruder, but it told no tales of hemlock boughs and Red Riding-hood capes, nor of a swift passage across the snow, held close against a wildly beating heart.

A few moments later Harriet was standing at Lucy's bedside. The girl was fast asleep, but the candle-light upon her face showed it flushed and tear-stained. In the mug upon the washstand the red rose drooped its head. Harriet bent down and breathed the delicate perfume, shading the candle lest the light should wake the sleeper. "I wish I could sleep like that," she thought, sighing deeply. T isn't much of a trouble that don't keep you awake nights."

Yet the touch was very gentle with which she drew the warm coverlid closer about the child.


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 Harriet was not herself to-night. For once in her life she had slipped from her own guidance. Something from without seemed to direct her movements; or was it something deep, deep within? As she closed her chamber door and put the candle upon the bureau, she made one last, half-hearted effort to break the spell which was upon her, but the effort was vain. A look of unwonted emotion transformed her handsome features, and, in sudden defiance of her own will, she pulled open a certain bureau drawer, and reaching far back under the cool linen, drew forth an old shell box. Her hands trembled a little as she lifted the lid. The subtle odor which clings about old letters floated up. She took them out and opened them, one after the other, straining her eyes to read them in the uncertain candle-light. Curiously enough, she did not think of putting on her glasses. The young eyes for which those lines were written had required no such aids. Each letter began: "My beloved Harriet," and each one was signed: "Your faithful James." Nor did they differ very greatly in their contents, these three or four yellow letters with the ink fading out. She read them slowly and with difficulty, a deep crimson coming into her cheeks, a strange softness into her eyes.

Last of all, she took up a piece of silk tissue-paper lying folded together in the bottom of the box. How long it was since she had looked at it! The creases were worn quite through. Lying


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 within,—yes, there it was, a faded rose, no longer red. The dull brownish petals would have crumbled had her touch been less tender. For a long, long time she looked at it before laying it carefully back into the box; then, with a sudden, passionate movement, she bowed her gray head upon the open letters, and wept—wept not like an old woman, but like a young girl in an abandonment of grief.

The candle burnt lower and lower, while Harriet Spencer sat and wept; the old clock struck three, and the faint yet pervasive odor of the yellowing paper crept slowly through the quiet chamber. It was gray dawn before the weary watcher sank into a troubled sleep.

But that short sleep bridged the way back to real life. There was no trace of weariness in the brisk step with which Harriet went about the house the next morning. Her voice, too, was quite steady and matter-of-fact as she said to Lucy: "How would you like to have me send and ask Frank Enderby to come in to supper to-night, seeing he was so polite as to go 'way over to Jane's to wait on you. We are going to have waffles," she tried to add, but there were close clinging arms about her neck and a soft cheek was pressed against her own for answer. Such behavior did not seem to Harriet quite decorous. She actually blushed, as she put the girl gently from her, saying: "There, there, Lucy! Don't take on about it."


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{| style="font-size:100%;"
 * NBCE || nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and explosives
 * NDU || National Defense University
 * NUDT || National University of Defense Technology
 * PACOM || Pacific Command
 * PAP || People's Armed Police
 * PCRS || Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System
 * PLA || People's Liberation Army
 * PLAA || PLA Army
 * PLAAF || PLA Air Force
 * PLAJLSF || PLA Joint Logistic Support Force
 * PLAN || PLA Navy
 * PLARF || PLA Rocket Force
 * PLASSF || PLA Strategic Support Force
 * PRC || People's Republic of China
 * QCCM || Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism
 * RMA || Revolution in Military Affairs
 * R&D || research and development
 * SCO || Shanghai Cooperation Organization
 * SLOCs || sea lines of communication
 * S&T || science and technology
 * TC || Theater Command
 * ETC || Eastern Theater Command
 * STC || Southern Theater Command
 * WTC || Western Theater Command
 * NTC || Northern Theater Command
 * CTC || Central Theater Command
 * THAAD || Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
 * }
 * PRC || People's Republic of China
 * QCCM || Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism
 * RMA || Revolution in Military Affairs
 * R&D || research and development
 * SCO || Shanghai Cooperation Organization
 * SLOCs || sea lines of communication
 * S&T || science and technology
 * TC || Theater Command
 * ETC || Eastern Theater Command
 * STC || Southern Theater Command
 * WTC || Western Theater Command
 * NTC || Northern Theater Command
 * CTC || Central Theater Command
 * THAAD || Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
 * }
 * ETC || Eastern Theater Command
 * STC || Southern Theater Command
 * WTC || Western Theater Command
 * NTC || Northern Theater Command
 * CTC || Central Theater Command
 * THAAD || Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
 * }
 * NTC || Northern Theater Command
 * CTC || Central Theater Command
 * THAAD || Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
 * }
 * THAAD || Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
 * }


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 Little Lucy did not mark the strangely tired look in her mother's eyes. A happy wonder filled her heart, and shut out all besides.

At the wedding, a year or two after that, some one remarked, "How well-preserved Harriet Spencer is!"

"Yes," said the widow Perkins, with a self-conscious sigh; "that comes of keeping your feelings under."


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NSON PRATT the younger was something of an old Betty. His mother had made the discovery when he was still in petticoats, and she had tried by many ingenious devices to change his nature. He was only her second child, and she, being then young and inexperienced, had not yet learned that natures are not to be changed. Years, however, and an instructive family of children taught her wisdom. She brought her son up in the paths of godliness and temperance; she inculcated in him the most sterling principles; she taught him self-reliance and integrity. But an old Betty he remained to the end of the chapter.

This was the more unfortunate since he had married a woman who would have seemed especially designed by Providence to be a trial to an old Betty in any capacity, and pre-eminently so in the capacity of helpmeet. Yet there were compensations in his lot, which Anson Pratt would have been the last man to underrate.


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{| style="font-size:100%;"
 * UN || United Nations
 * UNMISS || UN Mission in South Sudan
 * UNAMID || UN-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur
 * UNIFIL || UN Interim Force in Lebanon
 * UNSC || UN Security Council
 * UNPKO || UN peacekeeping operation
 * UNTSO || UN Truce Supervision Organization
 * }
 * UNIFIL || UN Interim Force in Lebanon
 * UNSC || UN Security Council
 * UNPKO || UN peacekeeping operation
 * UNTSO || UN Truce Supervision Organization
 * }
 * UNTSO || UN Truce Supervision Organization
 * }
 * }


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 Emmeline Joy, though not possessed of beauty, was a woman of a good deal of personal fascina tion. She had a piquant face and great vivacity. She had also her seasons of dreaminess—of remoteness from every-day concerns. She passed for an accomplished woman in the good old simple days when she was young, before the world grew critical and fault-finding, when people were still easily pleased. She could sing, and play the piano—a queer little thin-voiced instrument, having the maker's name done in mother-of-pearl, with floral ornamentations, on the lid. She could paint in water-colors, to the admiration of all beholders. She had a delightful talent for acting, and she so far succeeded in overcoming the prejudices of the Puritan community into which she had married, as to introduce private theatricals into staid old Dunbridge itself. She did none of these things well, judged by modern standards, unless it was perhaps the acting, in which she really excelled, by virtue of a remarkable power of mimicry and a spontaneity as refreshing as it was unusual. In music and painting she had no more technical facility than many of her contemporaries. But there was a touch of genius in all that she did, which made it go straight to people's hearts. Her painted flowers may have been a trifle out of drawing, but somehow she seemed to have got their fragrance into her pictures. The dear, old-fashioned tunes she played and sang were very primitive, but her touch made them


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 beautiful. And the same spark of genius that prevailed in what she did, also made her what she was, a woman of singular charm and lovableness. It was no wonder that Anson Pratt fell in love with her, in spite of her well known shortcomings; it was no wonder that he was quite as much in love with her as ever, after having suffered from those shortcomings for seven years.

Emmeline's manifold faults might all be summed up in a word—she was the very worst housekeeper imaginable. Anson Pratt, old Betty as he was, was forced to live in the midst of disorder and dust; he had to see his two boys, bright little fellows with a capacity for getting into trouble, going about in rags and tatters. He himself had more than once experienced the humiliation of substituting a pin for a button; he had sometimes walked the streets with the degrading consciousness of a hole in his socks. This would have been hard enough for any man to bear. For an old Betty it was wellnigh intolerable. Furthermore, although he was not an epicure, Anson liked his meals well cooked and well served, and this reasonable wish was rarely gratified. Slatternly, inefficient servants succeeded one another in the kitchen, and unpalatable viands appeared as a result upon the table. Emmeline never seemed to notice what she ate. She had a good, healthy appetite and a preoccupied mind, and she could not understand any one's being fastidious—about his food.


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 To do Anson justice, it was some time before he complained. During the early part of his married life the muddiest coffee had the flavor of nectar when his wife's hands poured it out; the most unpalatable food of her serving seemed ambrosial. And when, after many months, he returned to a normal state of mind, and ventured upon a mild protest, Emmeline hardly took it in earnest. In fact, Emmeline was the only person who knew Anson Pratt intimately, who had not discovered that he was an old Betty.

Mrs. Anson's general inefficiency was the more aggravating, because it existed side by side with unusual capacity. When, at not very rare intervals, the maid-of-all-work took French leave, Emmeline invariably rose to the occasion. Then it was that Anson was well fed and well cared for. Appetizing dishes were served in the most appetizing manner. The touch of genius which Emmeline possessed, the quick perception and the light hand, made themselves felt in the homeliest tasks on which she really put her mind. The difficulty usually was that she did not put her mind on these things. She had too many bad habits, which interfered with that system so essential in the government of a household. She would read Scott or Byron until far into the night, and wake in the morning dazed and sleepy. Or again, she would rise with the sun and take her boys for a long walk, out into the dewy fields, to listen to the meadow thrush,


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 instead of busying herself with housewifely duties. She had been known to practise an entire morning on a new piano piece, to spend days in fashioning a velvet tunic for Robbie, or an embroidered skirt for little Aleck, while the boys, happily unconscious, shocked the neighborhood in their well ventilated pinafores and tattered hats.

The two boys were very different, even at the age of five and three, respectively. Robbie, the elder, was the greater rogue of the two, the one who took the initiative in every scheme of mischief, leading the small boys of the neighborhood, as well as his matter-of-fact little brother, into scrapes innumerable. Yet when Emmeline played the piano, or sang an old ballad, the little figure that stole in on tiptoe and curled itself up in the corner of the sofa, that sat there motionless as long as the music lasted, was Robbie's, and Robbie's were the little arms that were most often flung about her neck in a burst of passionate affection, or an equally passionate burst of penitence. It was the little Robbie who was improvident with his playthings, who emptied his entire store of pennies for the roughest tramp who caine their way. It was little Robbie who gave his mother more trouble and more delight than a dozen little Alecks could have done.

Aleck, on the other hand, was his father's boy, the boy for whom Anson already prophesied success in life, and considering that the two were


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 little Pratts, brought up in Dunbridge, this prophecy was likely enough to come true. The old New England community of half a century ago knew how to prize a level head and a well-governed mind. Genius and impetuosity were rather thrown away upon our forebears. A boy who drew pictures on his slate instead of doing his sums, who forgot his history dates in enthusiasm over the history heroes, did not, in old times, arouse the tender and peculiar interest of his teachers. Nobody but his mother looked upon Robbie as anything more than a bright but troublesome little lad, with ears in crying need of being boxed.

Meanwhile, Emmeline lived an abstracted sort of life, throwing herself ardently into whatever happened to appeal to her for the moment, adoring her husband and her little boys, and taking the worst possible care of them. She led her own life of the imagination and the emotions, curiously oblivious of the clouds that were gathering on the domestic horizon. And Anson, tired of protesting, tired of "putting up" with things, tired of living "out at elbows," was gradually forming a great resolve.

For several weeks past, Emmeline had been given over, heart and soul, to the preparations for a "parlor comedy," to be performed in aid of a fund for buying a new church organ. She had not only to play the title-rôle, "The Artless Celestina," but she was stage-manager as well.


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 This latter undertaking was the more arduous of the two, because of the uncompromising stiffness of the material she had to work with. The women of her little troupe, sensible wives and daughters of Dunbridge citizens, women who had all their lives been engaged in repressing their more lively emotions, in refraining from indecorous exhibitions of feeling, found it difficult to teach their voices the art of trembling, their features the trick of looking moved in an imaginary situation. The estimable youth who had assumed the rôle of insinuating villain could scarcely be induced not to state his designs and convey the subtle cunning of his machinations in a voice with which he might have taken command of an army. As to Celestina's lover, though his declaration of undying affection smacked strongly of the counting-house, his arms and legs would have done credit to a Dutch windmill. But Emmeline never for a moment lost heart. She drilled her unpromising company with tact and spirit, and she threw into her own rôle a naturalness and fire which held its own against all odds. The play, according to Dunbridge standards, turned out a success, and the "leading lady" went home with her husband after the performance, exhausted but triumphant.

But great as had been Emmeline's perplexities, this period of excitement and anxiety had been far more severe a strain upon Anson's nerves than upon hers. His house had been more at sixes


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 and sevens than ever, his children had taken on more than ever the semblance of street-ragamuffins, and as for his food, he was left to the mercy of the most inefficient servant who had yet dispensed indigestion to this long-suffering household.

Yet Anson possessed himself in patience all through the time of rehearsals. He was even magnanimous enough to take a pride in his wife's success. He was a little bewildered, indeed, by the ease and naturalness with which she played the part of designing coquette, but her eagerness, when she turned to her rightful lord for approval, once the play being ended, proved entirely reassuring.

The next day Anson laid before her his list of grievances, and waited in the lingering hope of better things. Alas! It was a vain hope. Emmeline took his fault-finding in the sweetest spirit, promised to "see to things," and to "speak to" the servant, and immediately became absorbed in the manufacture of a pair of slippers for her husband's birthday, and forgot all about everything else.

Anson felt deeply injured, as he certainly had a right to do. He thought bitterly of his own hardworking life, of how he never looked to the right nor to the left when in the path of duty, of the discomforts and vexations he had endured for all these years, and his heart became hard within him.

On the evening of the third day after the the-


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 atricals he went down cellar to saw wood, a favorite diversion of his. He liked the damp, cold, clean cellar, and the sense of having his own way in his own province; he liked to feel his hand close firmly upon the smooth handle of the saw, he enjoyed the tingling sensation that went through the sole of his foot, pressed hard against the log, as the saw ground its way through the resisting fibres of the wood. On a cold March evening like this the exercise was particularly agreeable.

To-night, however, his mind was laboring harder than his muscles. Yes, he thought to himself,—sawing wood is rough work, and it makes a grating sound. But some difficulties have to be sawed through in just that hard, uncompromising way. As he tossed one stick after another onto the pile, he first held it in the small circle of light his lantern cast, and admired the smooth, even cut which the ugly tool had made. And as he worked, and as he pondered, he experienced a strong desire to saw through the difficulties of his daily life, no matter how rude and jarring the process might be.

He had a right to have a comfortable home, if ever aman had. It was a right that he fairly earned, every day of his life. Emmeline was very sweet, and he loved her very much, but, good heavens! a man could not live on sweetness and love! He kept sawing one log after another to the required length, and when he had had enough of it, he drew himself up, and took a long breath.


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 promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the Piece should be at all representable; who together with the copy of the Play (hastened by his means so as to prevent the full developement of the characters) received a letter from the Author to this purport, "that conscious of his inexperience, he had cherished no expectations, and should therefore feel no disappointment from the rejection of the Play; but that if beyond his hopes Mr. —— found in it any capability of being adapted to the Stage, it was delivered to him as if it had been his own Manuscript, to add, omit, or alter, as he saw occasion; and that (if it were rejected) the Author would deem himself amply remunerated by the addition to his Experience, which he should receive, if Mr. would point out to him the nature of its unfitness for public Representation;"—that this very Person returned me no answer, and, spite of repeated applications, retained my Manuscript when I was not conscious of any other Copy being in existence (my duplicate having been destroyed by an accident); that he suffered this Manuscript to wander about the Town from his house, so that but ten days


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 "I'll do it," he said to himself; "I swear I'll do it."

"It'll cost a good deal," he continued, as he put on his coat and hung up his saw on its own special peg, "but I can make it up somehow."

He went up stairs into the kitchen, where he hung up his lantern, and washed his hands at the sink. Then, as he passed on into the front of the house, he heard Emmeline's voice, singing a lullaby in the nursery. He paused and listened. Emmeline's singing always appealed to him. To-night her voice was wonderfully sweet, and he liked the words:

Emmeline made her own tunes when she sang to the children. The melody was low and crooning, and in the middle of it Anson could hear little Robbie's voice, saying sleepily: "Kiss me again, Mamma."

Anson leaned against the balustrade.

Was father a nobleman, to care so much about sordid things? Was not Emmeline, after all, a kind of queen, not made for common cares?

She had left out the rest of the verse now, and was merely murmuring that one line. For the hundredth time Anson Pratt's heart softened, and


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 his annoyances seemed petty and unreal. He took his hand off the railing, meaning to go up to the nursery, when his eye fell upon a long streak of dust, that ran over his hand, his wristband, and his coat-sleeve. He shuddered at the sight of it as only an old Betty could do, and striding into the sitting-room he slammed the door behind him.

The rude sound startled Emmeline out of her reverie, and little Aleck waked up crying.

The next evening, after the children were put to bed, Emmeline came down to the sitting-room, looking very pretty and housewifely in a black silk apron, with a white muslin neckerchief crossed over her breast. She took a good deal of pride in looking matronly, and longed for the time when Anson would let her wear a cap. Her face fell as she saw that her husband was reading his paper by the aid of a very smoky lamp.

"Oh, Anson," she cried, "I'm so sorry! I shall have to get you another lamp."

"Can't the girl fill this one?" he asked.

Anson had long since given up trying to keep run of the "girls names.

"I'm afraid there isn't any oil," she said, regretfully; "but never mind, the other lamp will do to talk by."

"Yes, any light will do to talk by." When the change had been made, Emmeline came and sat down beside him, with her little confiding air, which had disarmed him more than once when he


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 was on the verge of rebellion. But this time his heart was steeled.

Anson Pratt was a fine-looking man, an advantage of which he himself made very little account. If he had been told that he had more actual beauty than his wife, he would have been much offended. It was nevertheless a fact, and one which Emmeline knew and gloried in. To-night as she glanced at his handsome face in the halflight cast by the second-best lamp, a sudden misgiving seized her. The face was not at its best. The finely marked brows were contracted, the eyes looked nearer together than was quite becoming, the lips were so tightly compressed as to seem thinner than usual. Decidedly, Anson was out of sorts. Oh! what was it this time? Was it buttons? Or was it fat in the gravy? or" [sic]

"Emmeline," Anson said, in a slightly constrained voice, "I have been making up my mind about something for a long time, and now my mind is made up."

This was evidently a more serious matter than buttons or gravy, and Emmeline's courage revived, as it had a way of doing in the face of a real trouble.

"What is it, Anson? Do you think you'll have to take a partner after all?"

"Something like it," he answered, avoiding her eyes as he spoke. "I've engaged a housekeeper."


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 "A what?"

"A housekeeper."

"Engaged a housekeeper? Why, Anson, what do you mean!"

"I mean exactly what I say. I've engaged the woman Sister Harriet was telling us about. She's coming to-morrow afternoon."

"Coming here, to keep house for you? To take my place?"

"She's coming here to keep this house." Emmeline had grown very white.

"Why have you taken such a step without consulting me?"

"Because I was sure you would object, and I didn't want any discussion."

"But, Anson, what do you want of a housekeeper?"

"What most folks want of a housekeeper. To have the house kept." Anson was desperately afraid that his wife would persuade him to abandon his plan, and before she could interpose he had armed himself from top to toe in his grievances.

"I have borne a great deal, Emmeline. I've lived for seven years without any of the comforts ofa home. There isn't aman in Dunbridge who has had so much to put up with as I. And I've made up my mind that I'm not going to stand it another day. I'm going to try for once what it is like to have a clean house and whole clothes and something fit to eat."


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 "You've lived for seven years without the comforts of ahome? Do you mean that, Anson?"

"I mean just that."

"And there isn't aman in Dunbridge who has been so badly off as you?"

"In some respects, no! There isn't a man in Dunbridge that is as badly off as I."

Emmeline got up from her chair and walked about the room with swift, nervous movements. Anson kept his seat and kept his determination.

At last Emmeline came back and knelt down beside his chair.

There were very few women of her day and generation who could have knelt down in just that supplicating way, and very few voices that could have sounded so beseeching as did hers.

"Anson, won't you please give me one more trial? Won't you please tell that woman not to come?"

"No, I won't," he answered stolidly. "I've made up my mind to have a little comfort, and I've engaged Mrs. Beach for a month, beginning to-morrow."

"But, Anson, for my sake, for both our sakes, tell her not to come. Oh, Anson! I cannot bear it! I am sure I cannot bear it—please—please don't let her come."

Her tone of passionate entreaty was too intense to move him. It seemed to him like play acting.

"I tell you, Emmeline," he said, getting up and leaving her kneeling there beside his chair,


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 "the thing is done, and I'm not going to undo it. It's no more than my right to have at least a month's comfort, and I'm going to have it."

He felt that in saying "at least a month," he had made a great concession.

As he turned away Emmeline got up from her knees and steadied herself against the back of the chair. The blood had rushed back into her white cheeks, and her eyes had an unnatural light in them. But she spoke with a great deal of self-command.

"Anson," she said, and he turned and looked at her. "Anson, you will have to choose between us—I will not stay with you one hour after that womat comes into the house."

"And where shall you go?"

"I don't know. I suppose to mother's. But that is of no consequence. As long as I cannot be your housekeeper, you will have to choose. You can have your new housekeeper, or you can have me, but you can't have both. Oh, Anson, please don't drive me out of the house like this," she cried, coming toward him and putting both hands on his arm.

He remembered the streak of dust that had been there the evening before.

"Nonsense, Emmeline," he said, impatiently, shaking off her hands. "Don't be so theatrical. I've engaged the woman, and she's coming, and that's all there is about it. If you've a mind to fly into a passion, I can't help it. Only one thing


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 I must insist upon!" he added, sharply. "That you stay in your own house where you belong."

"Nevertheless I shall go."

There was a tone of quiet self-assertion in her voice that Anson had never heard before, and he suddenly felt himself in a white heat of anger.

"I forbid you to leave the house!" he cried. His masterful tone was also new to her, and for a moment husband and wife looked at each other, estranged and bewildered, as though all their old moorings had been swept away.

Then Emmeline left him and went slowly up stairs, with despair in her heart. If he could speak to her like that everything was at an end. Oh! Where should she turn, what should she do?

The nursery-door stood open at the head of the stairs, and instinctively she stayed her foot. The children! Neither of them had thought of the children. She went in and closed the door behind her and then she knelt down by the bed and burst into tears.

Tears have been a good deal maligned, but they are a great comfort. While Emmeline wept by the side of her sleeping boys she got her balance. It was impossible that she should do full justice to Anson's cause of complaint, that she should quite appreciate the enormity of her own transgressions. Indeed, her mind did not busy itself with either the one or the other. She simply struggled to adjust herself to the situation as it existed. After all everything was not over.


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 Here, at least, in those sturdy little fellows that needed her and needed their father too, was something real and abiding, something of a good deal more importance than anybody's injured sensibilities. No, all was not over. There was nothing to be tragical about. She was wounded, humiliated. It was very grievous. But they would get the better of it yet. Her soul revolted at the thought of the woman who was coming to usurp her place, her soul revolted at the tone in which her husband had spoken to her. But all would yet be well. She was sure that all would yet be well. She kissed the boys very tenderly, and then she slipped into her own room, where she went into consultation with herself.

Anson, meanwhile, resumed his seat and tried hard not to feel like a brute. Men are at a great disadvantage in their quarrels with women. The consciousness of a heavy hand, so to speak, discomposes them. Anson knew very well that in his desperate effort not to soften, he had hardened. He knew that his tone had been masterful, his behavior unchivalrous. Somehow that interview had given him a new and far from agreeable impression of himself. He found himself wondering whether, if he had married a less captivating and irresistible woman than Emmeline, he might not have turned out to be a domestic tyrant. Hehad always despised domestic tyrants.

Impatiently he sought refuge in the evening paper. But, alas! the print was bad, and the


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 second-best lamp was worse, and this small annoyance restored his wavering resolution.

In the broad light of day matters did not seem quite so serious, and even when Emmeline told him at breakfast that she was really going to pay a visit to her mother, it seemed a sufficiently natural thing to do, and he was relieved to find that it was not worth while to oppose her. Mrs. Joy lived in the city, and her house was easily accessible. He was only surprised that Emmeline did not propose taking the children with her, but he reflected that her mother was in delicate health and might not like two noisy boys about the house.

The "high tragedy" which had annoyed him in Emmeline the evening before had entirely disappeared. Indeed, there was an airy lightness in her manner, when she bade him good-bye, which was mortifying to him. He left the house with rather a heavy, inelastic step, and being but a mortal man, he did not feel her eyes upon him, as she gazed, half-blinded by tears, through the slats of the blinds, after his retreating figure.

And now began the era of peace and order for which Anson Pratt had longed. His new housekeeper proved to be a most efficient woman. She promptly got rid of the kitchen "baggage," as she termed the late incumbent, and took in her place a wild, red-headed Irish girl, freckled to the very tip of her nose, whose astonishing brogue and slam-bang manners made her seem anything


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 but promising. Under Mrs. Beach's skilful generalship, however, she toned down somewhat, and proved to be an admirable servant. Up early in the morning, always busy, cheery, and goodtempered, serving delicious meals, ready to lenda hand with the children, thoughtful, and attentive to her master. She had a way of helping Anson off with his great-coat, and having his slippers in readiness for him, which made him feel like a pampered aristocrat. Nor was he ungrateful.

"Katie," he said to her one evening, "you're a very good girl. I hope you are contented and happy with us."

"Indade, Sorr, but I am," she declared heartily.

"Mrs. Pratt will be pleased to find you here when she comes back."

Anson always made a point of referring to his wife in the presence of Mrs. Beach and Katie, who were quite ready to regard her with respect and admiration. Katie had a queer little way of looking askance when she had anything to say. With her eyes fixed upon Anson's coat-sleeve she asked:

"An' is it long that she'll be bidin' awa'?"

"No, she will come home before long." Then Katie, blushing violently under her freckles, blurted out: "Beggin' your pardon, Sorr. It's mesilf as was wonderin' how she could lave your honor and the two swate little boys, at all, at all!"


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 "Your mistress is obliged to be away," Anson replied, with a dignity which was intentionally chilling to the impulsive Katie. She dropped an apologetic courtesy and retired precipitately to her own domain.

Now Anson Pratt, who had got what he thought he most wanted, namely, an orderly house and a good table,—Anson Pratt, whose buttons were now always sewed on, whose wristbands were never frayed, was, of course, far from happy. Creature comforts are all very well, but they are not in themselves satisfying. Little Robbie quite expressed his father's feelings, when, after the first day of the new régime, Anson took him on his knee and asked him how he liked Mrs. Beach.

"Pretty well," said Robbie, "But I like mamma better."

Anson too found Mrs. Beach and her housekeeping "pretty well," in their way, but with little Robbie he "liked mamma better."

The lamp was always filled now, and he could read his evening paper in comfort. But it was remarkable how often the paper had to wait while he pored over a certain note which he had received the day after Emmeline's departure,—a particularly foolish thing to do, since he knew the note by heart, and could have read it just as well by the light of the second-best lamp, or without any light at all, for the matter of that.

The note had said:


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 "Dear Anson—

"Mother has asked me to go on a little journey with her, and as you are so well taken care of I thought it was a good time to go. I write this so that you need not come way up to mother's for nothing. I hope you like your new housekeeper and that you are enjoying all 'the comforts of a home.'

'Your affectionate wife.

"Emmeline."

Then there was a short postscript written in a less careful hand:

"Don't forget me, Anson—and kiss the boys for me."

Anson did not forget her, though he tried his best to take her desertion philosophically. The evening after Emmeline went away, for instance, he had resort to his favorite occupation of sawing wood, and he sawed himself, so to speak, into a very sensible frame of mind. But when he came and into the front of the house, he stopped mechanically and listened. He could almost hear Emmeline's voice singing:

Almost, but not quite. As he stood with his hand on the stair railing, his heart sank at the stillness of the house, and then, lifting his hand, he involuntarily looked to see if there was any mark on it. Singularly enough he experienced


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Author:Theodor Hagen

Works

 * "Die Oper auf dem Kirchhofe" (1848)
 * "The Opera and the Church-Yard" (1849) translated by Mary Ann Youatt

title: Author:Theodor Hagen


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 a shock of disappointment. No son or daughter of Old Lady Pratt was ever morbidly sentimental. Yet so much did Anson miss the voice he had listened for, that there would have been consolation, he thought, in the old familiar dirt streak. But alas! nothing was old and familiar. Everything was different.

And even the creature comforts seemed likely to forsake him, for scarcely had Mrs. Beach been in the house a week, when she was suddenly called away by the illness of her daughter.

Anson's heart gave a great bound at the news. Emmeline must come home now. She must come home at once. He would send for her. But where? How? She had given him no address. She had not written to him again. At first he thought he would go to Mrs. Joy's house and find out her whereabouts. But then his pride arose and he said to himself: "She has chosen to leave me in the lurch. She shall choose her own time for coming back."

Happily Katie proved quite equal to the emergency. She was housekeeper and servant in one. She seemed able to look after everything. The house, the kitchen, the master, and the boys.

One evening, soon after Mrs. Beach's departure, Anson went into the sitting-room where he found Katie lighting the lamp. In a glasson the table were the first crocuses of the season. The sight of them touched him. Emmeline had


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 always taken pride in finding the first crocuses as a surprise for him.

He stepped up and looked at them, and at the same time the boys came running in, looking clean and whole as they usually did nowadays. He took little Aleck on his knee, and then he said, as Katie finished her task:

"Did you put those flowers there, Katie?"

"Yes, Sorr."

She stood, with her apron in her mouth, looking shy and awkward. "I was thinkin', Sorr, as how it seemed so lonesome-like after the childers was put to bed, and I thought as how the shmall flowers might be company for ye'z."

"Thank you, Katie, they are very pretty," said Anson.

"They's my mamma's flowers," little Robbie declared, looking doubtfully at the smiling Katie. Katie had a grotesque smile. Her lips went down and in at the corners in a manner that was not prepossessing. She fixed her eyes, with an inconsequent expression on the key-board of the piano, and said: "Beggin' your pardon, Sorr, and does the mistress like the flowers?"

"Yes, Katie. Your mistress likes flowers," Anson replied, with a queer feeling in his throat.

"My mamma's more beautifuller than those flowers," Robbie asserted stoutly.

Meanwhile little Aleck, who had been rifling his father's pockets, had pulled out a small folded piece of paper. It was before the day of envel-


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 opes, and as it fell from the child's hand the paper flew open. Katie picked it up and handed it to her master, who folded it carefully, and put it back in his pocket, chiding Aleck rather sharply.

If Katie had been an observing young woman she would have noticed that the bit of paper was a note, much worn, and presumably very old. And yet if she had been quick enough to read the date she would have seen that it was written only ten days ago. But wild Irish girls have not always quick perceptions, and it is hardly to be supposed that Katie made any observations on the subject.

Whatever Katie lacked in perception, however, she made up in feeling. She evidently took her master's lonely and deserted state very much to heart. As she bustled about the dining-room, setting the table for supper, she stopped more than once to dry her eyes on the corner of her apron. Any one observing Katie in her unguarded moments would have discovered that she was one of those unfortunates who are born to do themselves injustice while lavishing devotion upon others. Such an observer would have learned that it was her shyness which distorted her features and made her voice harsh. When she was by herself her freckled face lost much of the gawky look which it took on in the presence of her betters. Her lower jaw did not drop so heavily, her eyes did not look so dull. Her movements, too, were


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 less awkward and jerky as she laid the table in unembarrassed solitude. And when, an hour after supper, she went up to give the boys their baths and put them to bed, there was a tender motherliness about her which was really very winning.

Little Robbie seemed full of thoughts of his mother that evening. He chattered on about her tothe sympathetic Katie as she polished off his small pink ears, and even when the ablutions were over his glowing eulogy still continued.

"She's just the most beautifullest lady you ever saw," he declared, as Katie tucked him up in bed beside his little brother. "You'll just love her so! She's got such pretty red cheeks, and such shiny black hair. Katie, don't you wish you was pretty? And she plays the pianner, and she sings, Katie—oh! she sings such pretty songs when she puts us to bed. Can't you sing, Katie? Can't you sing just one little song?"

"Ach! go way wid ye'z," cried Katie, "and would ye be afther makin' a lady o' the likes o' me?"

She knelt down beside the bed, and tucked the little fellow in, and then she watched him as he fell asleep.

By and by, when he was breathing regularly, the warm flush coming on his cheeks, the lips opening just a trifle, she stooped and kissed him. She laid her arm across him till her hand touched his little brother, and then she began to croon


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 the sweetest song, very, very softly, and strangely enough, the words were the old familiar ones:

Robbie stirred in his sleep, and murmured, "Mamma," and she slipped her arm under his head, and he nestled down against her, and she went on singing, singing:

—not quite so softly now.

Anson, sitting down-stairs by himself, with the crocuses beside him, heard the song, and a sudden, superstitious thrill went through him. He dropped his paper, and stole to the foot of the stairs, and the sweet voice, crooning more softly again, just reached his ear.

"Emmeline!" he cried, and bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time. There was no light in the nursery, where he could only discern a shadowy figure kneeling by the bed. "Emmeline!" he whispered, "Emmeline!"

"Sh, Anson! Don't wake the children."

He leaned down and tried to lift her up, but, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he could see little Robbie's head against her breast.

"Emmeline! Emmeline! When did you come home?"

"I've been here all the time," she said, with


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 a little sob, gently laying Robbie's head upon the pillow. "You stupid, stupid Anson! You never knew me!"

"Emmeline! What do you mean?"

"Sure an' I'm thinkin' the misthress has got home, Sorr!"

It was the voice of the faithful Katie, whom he was apparently holding in his arms.

"And did you really think?" asked Emmeline, an hour later, when they sat together by the light of the best lamp,—"And did you really think that I could leave you and the children for ten whole days, and not know how you were getting along?"

"No, I couldn't have thought so," said Anson, with conviction. "I couldn't possibly have thought that. I must have known all the time that you were Katie, only I didn't quite take it in."

As Anson looked at his wife's face, where a few of the more obdurate freckles still clung, and into the eyes which looked so natural and so dear, in spite of the hint of red which still lingered in the eyebrows, he thought that he had never been so well content in all his life—no, not even seven years ago, when his wife seemed to him to be a perfectly faultless being. But he only said:

"Go and play me something, Emmeline. I haven't heard the piano for so long."


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 And as the sweet familiar chords answered to the old magic of her touch, he got up and took the crocuses over to the piano, and set them down where she could see them, and she played on and on, nearly all the evening.

That was a very pleasant evening, and it taught them more than all their troubles had done. Things never came to such a very bad pass again. When, occasionally, this or that went wrong in the household, and the old Betty in Anson rebelled, Emmeline would strengthen her own resolution, and Anson's patience too, by crooning softly, as though to herself, a certain old nursery rhyme, beginning:


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EN'S wife was a Hazeldean—a fact which that estimable woman rarely lost sight of. It was, perhaps, not to be expected that her husband and her husband's family should give quite due weight to the circumstance, but they were not allowed to forgetit. At first, to be sure, the Pratts, who were themselves unpretentious sort of people, were not without some pride in the connection; and even Old Lady Pratt herself did not object to letting fall the remark that "Ben's wife was a Hazeldean." An advantage like this, however, is one that should be sparingly used by its possessor; and it must be confessed that Mrs. Ben was inclined to push it more than was quite well-judged, and that, as time went on, the Pratts allowed a suspicion of satire to creep into the statement which had been made at first in perfect good faith.

Yet there was much to be said in defence of Mrs. Ben. Perhaps no one who has not had the experience can justly estimate the sacrifice which the woman makes who relinquishes a name of


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 three syllables, and one of such romantic and poetic associations as Hazeldean (if, indeed, there be such another) for a curt, unembellished monosyllable like Pratt.

Moreover, this foible, together with certain trifling vanities and affectations engendered by it, was almost the only flaw in an honest and kindly, if somewhat high-strung nature. "Ben's wife" was worthy of that title and proud of it too. She knew in her heart that she would rather have been Ben's wife than a duchess. Yet being securely Ben's wife for all time, and, as she devoutly believed, for all eternity, she still enjoyed the retrospective glory of having been a Hazeldean.

Her first son was unquestioningly named Benjamin; but great was her rejoicing when the third child turned out to be a boy, and she could call him Hazeldean—Hazeldean Pratt! She felt as though she had never appreciated her own name until this happy combination proved what a lustre it could throw upon a single commonplace syllable. The boy was called Hazeldean from his cradle, and no corruption of the name was ever tolerated in the family. The two elder children, when they first ventured to call their little brother "Hazie, for short," were promptly suppressed, and by the time the younger ones came to speech, the three syllables were so firmly established in their rights that they seemed one and indivisible.


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 Ben's wife was fond of dress, but Heaven forbid that that be accounted a flaw! She was a woman of excellent taste, thanks to which her house and her person were always as pleasant to look upon as the fashions of the day would permit. When the large hoops came into vogue, she was forced into them, as it were, for she would have been unpleasantly conspicuous without them. Yet she was never betrayed into extremes, and would have nothing to do with the "floating bell," when that climax of crinoline exaggeration appeared upon the scene.

In her house she was more independent still. It was a square house, modest, yet roomy, with the inevitable cupola on top. The house was painted gray with darker gray blinds, to suit the taste of the mistress, who disapproved the prevailing white and green of the suburb where she lived. When she refurnished her parlor, some fifteen years after her marriage, she boldly rejected the brilliant crimsons and liberal gildings of the period in favor of quiet colors. She chose a carpet of olive-brown Brussels with a dull red palm-leaf pattern, and window hangings of olive brown rep and plush, the effect being lightened by inner curtains of the finest and whitest muslin. Her furniture and her wall-paper were in soft neutral tints such as would to-day be called æsthetic, though they were little appreciated at that time, even by Ben himself. Indeed, if the truth were known, Ben, when he gave his wife


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 carte blanche for refurnishing, had been dazzled by the most resplendent visions of red velvet sofas and a red velvet carpet bestrewn with baskets of pink and white roses, similar to, but even surpassing in brilliancy, the possessions of his wealthy brother-in-law James Spencer. His cheerful resignation when this glittering bubble of his fancy was pricked by the delicate point of his wife's finer perception, only showed what a thoroughly good Christian Ben was, and the amiability with which he submitted to the olive browns was eventually not without its reward. For many years after, the wheel of fashion having taken another turn, he had the satisfaction of seeing his neighbors revolutionize their houses at great expense, for the sake of bringing about the very condition of subdued harmony which had so long reigned under his own roof. Then it was that Mrs. Ben, who had meanwhile become an old woman, reaped a belated harvest of praise, and rejoiced in the consciousness of having proved herself to have been thirty years in advance of her time.

But this is a digression.

At the date in question, though the olive browns had not yet found their justification, Mrs. Ben, or Martha, as she was more familiarly called, had won a reputation as a very safe authority in matters of taste.

She was now the mother of five children, ranging in age from eighteen-year-old Ben down to


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 little Eddie, a small mischief of five. She lavished upon them an adoring affection, yet she was not an over-indulgent mother, for she had very well-defined theories in regard to education. Her husband, secure in the conviction that his children would get all the training they needed without his doing violence to his own inclinations in the cause of discipline, was not afraid to spoil them to his heart's content; and there was no denying that he, with his good-humored smile and sly jokes, had, all unconsciously, stolen many a march upon his wife in their young affections.

Ben had a great respect for his wife's theories, though he himself did not possess the sign of one. She, on her part, could forgive him the lack, since her own pet theories found an embodiment in his person. He washer ideal of what a man should be—an exemplification of all the broad virtues which she considered essential in a manly character. He had courage, integrity, good judgment, and equanimity. Moreover, his very failings were such as to endear him still more to his wife. In the first place he was forgetful, a shortcoming which tallied very satisfactorily with her theory that a man should be too much preoccupied with great affairs to have a memory for small ones. Another source of gratification to her was his negligence in regard to his clothes and other belongings; she having always entertained a lively contempt for a "finical" man. Best of all, he was open-handed to a fault, an admired weak-


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 ness which she joyfully corrected by the practice of small and persistent economies, such as she would have censured in him.

Martha's excitability of temperament, due, not to nerves, but to an uncommonly active imagination, was a constant source of wonder to Ben, though as years went by he had learned to treat it lightly.

"Ben," she would exclaim at supper of a Saturday evening, while her eyes grew big with apprehension, and suppressed anxiety vibrated in her voice—"O Ben! Did you remember to order any dinner for to-morrow?" It was plain that the vision of a starving family had suddenly terrified her imagination.

Ben would take a spoonful of quince preserve with the slow relish of an epicure, then look across the table at his anxious helpmeet, with a deepening of the crow's feet which a life of quiet humor had prematurely graven at the corners of his blue eyes, and say, in a tone of inimitable self-complacency: "Yes, Martha, I got a little salt fish and a cent's worth of asparagus."

Then the children would become hilarious over their father's wit, Martha would draw a long sigh of relief, untroubled by his jesting, and, behold, the crisis was passed.

Ben's wife was a great reader of books, especially of history; and the histories of that day being chiefly a succession of royal biographies, her imagination was peopled with kings and queens.


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 She had always cherished a secret desire to behold a crowned head—a desire of which she was a little ashamed, in her republican heart, yet which rose to fever heat when the papers announced the coming visit of the young Prince of Wales to this country. His head, to be sure, had not yet been crowned, but was he not the next heir to the great throne of England, and was he not a youth in whom past and future united to produce an historic and romantic personage of the first water? And she, Martha Hazeldean (for so she still called herself in her moments of exaltation), she was to behold with her own eyes this royal boy. She eagerly read all the newspaper items which heralded and accompanied his visit to Canada, whilst Harper's Weekly, to which she was a subscriber, acquired a new and dramatic interest when portraits of the young prince began to appear among the illustrations of that admirable paper.

Ben was, of course, well aware of his wife's state of mind. If he had tried to do so, he could not have shared her feeling, and it never occurred to him to try. Ben was not sufficiently subtle to make any endeavors to cultivate sentiments which did not spring up of their own accord. He was republican to the core, and he could not see that Queen Victoria's son was necessarily more interesting than his own boys. That a great country, which had emancipated itself at the cost of blood and treasure from all the "folderol" of


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 royalty, should be so ready to make a toy of it at the first opportunity, struck him as being quite as absurd as though his eighteen-year-old Ben were deliberately to go back to nursery rhymes and tin soldiers.

But though Ben did not share his wife's feelings he was as ready to gratify them as though they had been his own.

One pleasant afternoon in October, Mrs. Ben, adorned with a black silk apron and wearing a deep Shaker sun-bonnet, was out in the garden gathering a basketful of late nasturtiums, with which to put a touch of autumn sunshine into her olive-brown parlor. She had the faculty of disposing a bit of color just in the place where it was needed, and Ben had begun to perceive that these judicious touches gave their rooms a gayer, cheerier air, than all the downright crimson and gold seemed able to impart to the highly colored apartments which had once been his envy.

As she stooped to trace with careful fingers the windings of one of the-delicate, brittle stems, she heard a step upon the gravel walk, and glancing up, beheld her husband coming toward her. His appearance soearly in the day would have alarmed her had she not perceived a twinkle of roguish mystery in his eyes, which he was vainly trying to repress.

"Why, Ben!" she exclaimed, rising hastily to her feet and hurrying toward him. "What has brought you home so early?"


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 "Is it early?" he asked, innocently, making as though he would attack the citadel of the Shaker bonnet.

"Oh! oh! You'll muss my hair!" she cried, retreating.

"All done up for the afternoon?"

"Of course it is," was the reproachful answer. "But, Ben, what has brought you home so early?"

"Old Pacer," he replied, this time with a still more quizzical look.

Ben was not the man to be hurried into an agreeable disclosure. He loved too well the pleasures of anticipation.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, with growing impatience.

"Yes. I've got home."

Ben was sometimes very trying.

"Come, Martha," he called, as she started, in simulated dudgeon, to walk away to her nasturtium beds, "let's go and get some grapes."

"Good—ain't they?" he observed, as they sat in the long arbor, eating the delicious Catawbas that grew in beautiful clusters just within their reach.

A pleasant silence fell upon them, broken only by the clucking of hens in a neighbor's yard, while the mellow October sunshine filtered through the thinning vines and checkered the backs of the two figures sitting amicably together. Martha had taken off her Shaker bonnet, and the sunshine slanted across the glossy black hair, which was brushed smoothly down over the ears,


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 ago I saw the song in the third Act printed and set to music, without my name, by Mr. Carnaby, in the year 1802; likewise that the same person asserted (as I have been assured) that the Play was rejected, because I would not submit to the alteration of one ludicrous line; and finally in the year 1806 amused and delighted (as who was ever in his company, if I may trust the universal report, without being amused and delighted?) a large company at the house of a highly respectable Member of Parliament, with the ridicule of the Tragedy, as "a fair specimen", of the whole of which he adduced a line:

In the original copy of the Play, in the first Scene of the fourth Act, Isidore had commenced his Soliloquy in the Cavern with the words:

as far as I can at present recollect: for on the possible ludicrous association being pointed out to me, I instantly and thankfully struck out the line. And as to my obstinate tenacity, not only my old acquaintance, but (I dare boldly aver) both the Managers of Drury Lane Theatre, and every Actor and Actress, whom I have recently met in the Green Room,


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 and passed in flat braids across the back of the head. She was not as much absorbed in epicurean delight as her husband seemed to be, but since he was in a teasing mood it was not worth while to talk to him.

Presently he spoke in an absent tone which seemed a trifle studied, while he held up a fresh bunch of grapes to his own admiring gaze.

"I don't s'pose, Martha, that you'd care anything about going to the Prince's ball?"

"The Prince's ball," cried Martha, with a flush of excitement. Then, recovering herself: "Nonsense, Ben! What a tease you are!"

"Oh, then you wouldn't care to go? Well, I told Edward I didn't think you'd take any interest in it, and I felt pretty sure you wouldn't want the trouble of having a ball-dress made. I know I shouldn't."

"O Ben! Is there really going to be a ball for the Prince, and is Edward going?

"Yes, Edward's going, and he thought may be, as Lucia was in mourning, you might like to take her place and go with him. But I didn't s'pose you'd care much about it."

Martha's face glowed, and Ben's countenance was simply brimming with satisfaction as he watched the dawning upon her of this great, this stupendous idea.

"O Ben! you know I should like to go! Of course you said yes; nowdidn't you? Ah, don't tease! Come, tell me all about it."


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 Then Ben, having sipped his cup of pleasure long enough, proceeded to drink it down in generous draughts; for he loved, of all things, to make Martha's eyes shine.

For the next ten days Mrs. Ben was in a whirl of excitement. In the first place, there was the gown to be bought and made. She decided upon a "moiré antique," a silk then in the height of fashion, and which she considered economical, because of its great durability. She was divided in her mind between several neutral tints. One was called "ashes of roses"; another rejoiced in the euphonious name of "monkey's breath." When she finally fixed her choice upon a rich "mauve," Ben could not be persuaded to call it anything but "ashes of monkeys." But to Martha, nothing which concerned the ball seemed a fit subject for mirth. It was really a solemn occasion to her, this entering into the immediate, the actual presence of royalty. The only difficulty was that it engrossed her thoughts too much. She felt it; she regretted it; yet do what she would, she could not keep her thoughts fixed upon any other subject.

She had not dared entrust the making of so grand a gown to little Miss Plimpton, who went out by the day, and had hitherto contented the ambition of the family, and she had thus fallen a victim to a fashionable dressmaker, who had the reputation of disappointing her customers. Hence, in the days that were to elapse before her gown


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 should come home, poor Martha did not have a moment's peace of mind. Questions also arose of the very highest importance in regard to the fashion of the dress, which she alone could decide. Should the skirt be looped in five festoons, or six? Should the trimming be of black lace, or white? Was llama lace sufficiently rich for a Prince's ball, or did etiquette demand "real thread"? On the one hand, llama lace was much cheaper, but then it was quite inferior. And is not the best the cheapest, when judged by true standards? Thread lace, for instance, could be handed down from generation to generation, and would always be valuable. It was almost like real-estate, or diamonds. If she only had diamonds to wear, by the way! But alas! though she was a Hazeldean, her share of the family jewels consisted in a pair of topaz ear-rings and a set of turquoise; both of which were manifestly unsuited to a state occasion. Even the diamond ring which Ben had given her on their tenth anniversary would be concealed by her glove.

These, and like perplexities and speculations, were chasing each other like mad through her brain while she went about her household duties, and, sad to say, even when she sat in church. Strive as she might the next Sunday, she could not rid her mind of the idea that the number of festoons in her skirt was to be settled by the number of heads in Mr. Hawley's sermon. And


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 when he wound up on "fifthly," so preoccupied was she in trying to picture to herself the "effect" of the five festoons thus decided upon, she scarcely heard the salutary admonition, "Fix not your hearts upon the things of this world."

None of the Pratt family had thought of such a thing as going to the ball, and indeed it was well that they had not. For boasting, as they did, but few connections in high life, they might not have gained admittance. Martha's brother Edward, on the other hand, had married the daughter of a "merchant prince," (a fitting alliance for a Hazeldean), and he lived in the city, where he was quite a personage. It was, therefore, most natural that he should come to the fore on occasions like the present.

The Pratts, however, though themselves too stanch in their republicanism to regret their own exclusion from the ball, were far from indifferent to Martha's coming elevation. They only half approved the expensive new dress, indeed, on the ground that she was not likely ever to have another chance to wear it, but they were none the less eager to see her in it, and there were few persons among their large acquaintance who had not been informed that "Ben's wife was going to the Prince's ball." Whence it is fair to conclude that they were not positively ashamed of the circumstance.

Old Lady Pratt alone held out against the popular current of curiosity and excitement. She


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 had a vivid recollection of the War of 1812, and of the burning of public buildings at Washington, and to her the British were, and would always remain, "the enemy." As to "Martha's craze," she contented herself with one bit of sarcasm, which gave her much gratification and hurt nobody. She told Harriet, her eldest daughter and confidante, that she "s'posed Martha was countin' on gettin' a chance to tell the Prince that she was a Hazeldean."

For her own part, Old Lady Pratt was convinced that she would not have gone to the window to look out if the procession had passed through Green Street; a degree of patriotism on the old lady's part, which was, happily, not destined to be put to the test.

The ball was to take place on Thursday evening, and on Wednesday morning the Prince actually did arrive in Boston. The two boys, Ben and Hazeldean, who went to school in town, witnessed the august entry into the city, but the rest of the family succeeded in curbing their impatience until the grand procession which was announced for the next day. Mrs. Ben awaited the return of the boys with the keenest interest. She was somewhat disappointed in their report, in which the "Light Dragoons" and the crowd of spectators played a more conspicuous part than the Prince himself. To her urgent inquiries in regard to his Royal Highness, these unsusceptible young republicans had nothing more


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 definite to say than that they "guessed he was well enough."

The grand gown had not yet arrived, but during supper a messenger, who had been sent to inquire about it, came back with the cheering assurance that it was coming in an hour. Thereupon the boys were despatched to tell Aunt Harriet and the girls that their mother would try on the dress as soon as it should arrive, and would be glad of their opinion. Little Eddie, who was somewhat hoarse, and was in wholesome fear of missing the procession next day, submitted to an early bed, but all the rest of the family sat awaiting, with bated breath, the arrival of the gown. It was a tedious evening, for the faithless dressmaker did not redeem her promise until nearly ten o'clock. In fact, Harriet and the girls were on the point of departing when the door-bell rang, sending a tidal wave of excitement over the stagnant waters of the company.

The gown was displayed with much ceremony, and all agreed that it was "both handsome and genteel." Harriet and the girls helped put it on, and so satisfying was the effect that the wished-for jewels were scarcely missed. Indeed, something of the translucent light and glow of gems seemed to emanate from the mother-of-pearl fan with which Edward had thoughtfully presented his sister, and which lent a peculiar air of distinction to the toilette.

Late as the hour was, they all lingered a long


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 time, chattering and admiring and speculating as to the impending glories. The boys, being sleepy after the conflicting duties and excitements of the day in the city, were the first to disappear. Then the Pratt girls were sent to bed, and presently Ben escorted his sister and nieces home, leaving Martha in solitary possession of her own magnificence.

While the voices of her departing guests were still audible on the stairs, Martha, who could no longer restrain her impatience for a complete view of herself, mounted upon a chair before her toilet-glass. From this eminence she could see her voluminous skirts to great advantage, and even the open-worked stockings encased in bronze slippers were visible. The head, to be sure, was not included in the reflection—a fact which quite escaped her notice; for Martha's vanity was of a singularly impersonal kind, and she was as unconscious of any charms of countenance as she was of the graces of disposition which others prized in her. It was the gown, and that alone, which commanded her respect and admiration. She stood there so lost in contemplation of its beauties that she scarcely noticed that her guests still lingered in the passage-way, till she heard the heavy thud of the front door closing upon them.

A sudden hush ensued. She stood upon the chair, turning slowly round and round after the manner of the lay figures in the shop-windows,


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 when suddenly she became aware of a strange, muffled sound. She paused, straining her ear to listen. What was it? Her heart stood still beneath the stiff breastplate of moiré antique. Could it be burglars? No; it was too early, and there were lights burning. Was it the wind? The wind never made a sound like that. And even while she tried to reason about it, the conviction seized her that it was a creature in distress. Only for a moment did she stand motionless, her eyes dilating with dread, the blood surging to her heart. Then, with a stifled cry, she sprang from the chair, flinging far from her the fan which she had held in her hand, and rushed to her dressing-room, through her dressing-room to little Eddie's chamber beyond; for—oh, terrible certainty!—it was from his room, from his bed, from his lips, that the blood-curdling sound came!

"My darling! my precious! what is it?" she cried, bending over him in mortal terror. "Speak my darling! speak, Eddie! Tell mother."

But the cruel gurgling and gasping were the only answer. With shaking hands she struck a light. There lay the poor little fellow battling for his life, his face purple, his eyes bright with distress.

She opened the entry door, and fairly flew to the boys' room. "Ben! Ben!" she cried, "run for the doctor! Eddie is dying of the croup! Run for your life! Hazeldean! go for Dr. Baxter; Dr.


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 Walton may be out. Run, boys! Fetch some one—any one! Run!"

The boys were on their feet in an instant. In another moment she was at the child's bedstead, trying one ineffectual remedy after another. Her slender science was soon exhausted, all to no purpose. The struggle went on in a succession of alarming paroxysms. Then she sat upon the bed and held the suffocating child in her arms, trembling in a despairing knowledge that she could not help him, yet with the deep overwhelming urgency of a mother's love, which cannot credit its ownimpotency. She held him close, one of his little hands convulsively clasping hers, the small curly head pressed hard against her breast. Oh! the pathos of those baby curls, and that drawn, agonized baby face!

"In a minute, my precious," she kept saying, "in a minute the doctor'll come and make you well—just a minute, my poor darling. It'll be over soon."

Over? How? As she spoke the words a desolating fear swept all her faith away, and suddenly, as in a flash of light, those other words, unheeded and forgotten, struck upon her memory: "Fix not your hearts upon the things of this world."

She looked down with a quick pang of remorse upon the stiff moiré antique. Alas! she who would have enfolded her darling in the softest textures, must see him lie in his extremity against


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 the cold, untender surface of this hateful gown! The poignancy of that thought was almost more than she could bear, and in the sudden rush of remorse and terror all her innocent vanity stood distorted into the guise of sin.

"My God! my God!" she prayed, as she had never prayed before, "I have been a wicked, worldly woman! Oh, my God! have pity!" No other words came, but all through those interminable minutes while she waited for help, "Have pity," she prayed,—"have pity!"

And suddenly, like an angel of deliverance, the doctor stood before her. He stooped and lifted the child from her arms, saying: "Don't be frightened, Martha, we'll save him yet." And she no more doubted his word than she would have doubted him had he indeed been an angel sent straight from heaven in answer to her prayer.

By two o'clock all was quiet and the child was sleeping peacefully.

"Come, Martha," Ben said, putting his hand on her shoulder as she sat by the bedside, still clad in the moiré antique. "Come, do go to bed, the doctor says there is nothing to fear, and I'll sit up with Eddie. You won't be fit for the ball to-morrow."

"The ball! the ball," she repeated. "Oh, Ben!"

But she went and changed the ball dress, shuddering as she listened to its stiff rattle, and then, in a soft wrapper, she lay down upon the bed be-


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 side her boy. All night she listened to his easy, regular breathing, and all night long there was such a thanksgiving in her heart that she could not sleep.

The next day the child was quite himself again, trotting about the house, as active and as naughty as he had ever been in his life. Hetold his sisters he had had a "bad dream." It had, indeed, been a bad dream, a nightmare, which in his mother's eyes threw its ominous shadow upon all that had preceded and all that was to have followed it. No amount of reasoning could induce her to go to the ball, nor could she bring herself to look upon that terrible midnight hour as anything but a punishment and a warning.

"I can't help what you say, Ben," she protested with a fervor which he only half understood. "I've been a wicked, thoughtless woman. If I hadn't had my heart 'fixed upon the things of this world,' I shouldn't have been parading about in that moiré antique dress, talking so fast that I couldn't hear that precious child gasping for the breath of life. Think of it! only think of it! A little helpless child lying at death's door, while his mother's head was so full of princes and balls that she had forgotten she had a child to her name! No, Ben, I wouldn't goa single step. It would be tempting Providence. And besides," she added, giving what was, after all, the true reason, "I couldn't."

"And Edward?" urged Ben, whose argumen-


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 tative powers were not great. "And Edward? And that handsome gown?"

"Edward will have to go without me. And the gown?" She paused an instant, while a familiar look came into the ardent face. "Why, the gown will make over nicely for one of the girls when they are grown up. You know, Ben, the colors I choose don't go out of fashion. The Hazeldeans all have good taste."

Ben was consoled and relieved. Martha might give up the ball—though he didn't see the sense of it,—but she had not changed her nature yet; she was still a Hazeldean.

That day all the family but the inconsolable Eddie and his mother went to town to Uncle Edward's office, to see the procession escort the Prince to the State-House. They came home with glowing accounts of the fine display. Even Ben, the heretic, had found it surprisingly interesting to be looking straight down out of his own republican eyes at the future King of England, and he owned as much.

"And to think, Martha, that you shouldn't see the Prince after all!" he said at supper.

"Hadn't you betterchange your mind, and go to the ball?" he added, coaxingly; for a moral impossibility is a difficult thing to make other people understand.

Martha was at that moment engaged in the motherly office of drying the fingers of her youngest, who had been surreptitiously dabbling them


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 in his bowl of milk. She was thinking how she adored that little, chubby, mischievous paw, and "the things of this world," including the Prince and all his train, seemed to her very remote and indifferent.

"No, Ben," she said, "I don't care anything about the ball."

This was more conclusive than the ardor with which she had met his previous appeals, and Ben gave up the contest.

Perhaps the only person in the family who wholly sympathized with Mrs. Ben's feeling was her sharp little mother-in-law. When news was brought her of Martha's "foolish notion" of not going to the ball, just because Eddie had had the croup in the night—and not the real croup at that, her informant added,—Old Lady Pratt behaved in a very disappointing manner. In the first place, she took off her spectacles and rubbed them vigorously with her folded pocket-handkerchief before she spoke; a thing she did, only when a good deal moved; and then she said, with unusual warmth, "Martha's a good woman, I declare for 't, if she is a Hazeldean!"


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OW, Jane Bennett, you ain't no call to fash yourself about William," said Old Lady Pratt, looking over her steel bowed spectacles at her daughter. "William's got too good a head-piece to think jest as other folks do about every thing, and you might as well give up, fust as last, expectin' him to be cut and dried in his opinions."

Mrs. Henry Bennett, of Westville, who was paying her mother a visit, never let conversation languish for lack of a retort.

"I don't know 's William's got any better right to his opinions than other folks have to theirs. And it's my opinion that he's disgracing the family with his wrong-headed talk."

Old Lady Pratt bridled. "Ef the family never gits no wuss disgraced than that, I guess there wont be no great cause for blushin'."

"Well, Mother," snapped Jane. "You always did take William's part. I don't know 's we'd ought to expect you to change in your old age!"

Old Lady Pratt was not fond of bickerings, so she let this thrust pass without rebuke.


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 Jane Bennett, as her mother had made a point of calling her, ever since she persisted in marrying contrary to the best advice, was something of a thorn in the old lady's flesh. One could see that, as often as the two women talked together. Jane was superficially almost the counterpart of her mother: in appearance, small, dark, and erect. But in her the decision of her mother's character took on the form of obstinacy; the wholesome tartness of the elder woman's speech, had, in the younger, degenerated to acidity. Old Lady Pratt was distinguished by a certain liberal mindedness. With some few exceptions she was open to new ideas and tolerant of innovations. Jane, though very much given to harboring fixed ideas, was inclined, when once her mind was turned in a new direction, to go to extremes. When homœopathy, for instance, came into vogue, she not only accepted it for herself, but she pushed her son, ignorant and untrained, into a pretence of the practice of it. The wrong thus wrought he discovered, and set right as far as in him lay, but Jane Bennett never suspected the harm she had done. She had nota keen scent for her own mistakes, and her self-complacence was, therefore, rarely disturbed. As few people ever argued with her, she had not that familiarity with opposition which more yielding natures early acquire. Hence she found it impossible to reconcile herself to the quiet declaration of a heresy with which her brother William had recently startled her.


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 It was the troublous autumn of 1860. Abraham Lincoln's election had struck terror to the hearts of the conservative part of the community. Many a man who, four years later, was to regard that plain backwoodsman as the hero and savior of the nation, shrank from the impending consequences of his election. William Pratt was one of the conservatives.

"The South will secede," he had declared with conviction, when the election was discussed in family conclave.

"Then we'll teach them a lesson!" said his sister Jane, vindictively.

"I suppose we shall," William admitted, "but we haven't any business to. They have as good a right to go out of the Union as they had to come into it."

For a moment even Jane was speechless. Then she said with withering sarcasm: "Perhaps you think there's nothing wrong about slavery?"

"You've found me out, Jane. I will not deceive you. If the South should win, I propose to buy a cat-o'-nine-tails and a brace of bloodhounds, and apply for a place as overseer."

And that was all Jane could get out of her brother on the subject. His flippant jest about slavery could not be taken seriously, but at least it was clear that he believed in the right of secession, and she made the most of that.

Jane did not love her brother William. The two were "born to fight," as their placid, easy-


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 going father—now at rest—had long ago declared. Jane's marriage and removal to another town might have brought about a truce, had she not carried with her the rankling memory of one of William's very worst and most reprehensible speeches. When all the family were up in arms about her predilection for Henry Bennett, William had said to his mother—and Jane had overheard the taunt: "We may as well make up our minds to Jane, Mother. There's no use in trying to reason with her, since she's got too old to be spanked."

It was certainly a most indecorous as well as disrespectful remark, and one which Jane had every reason to resent. How could she be expected, after that, to feel a proper gratitude, when the offender subsequently loaned her husband fifteen hundred dollars, without interest and with but small hope of return? What if this timely help did enable Henry Bennett to set up for himself in his trade of optician? What money obligations could atone to a really noble mind for a personal insult? Henceforth Jane nursed her grievance and hated her brother to her heart's content.

This was not the only time that William Pratt had "tied a knot with his tongue which he could not untie with his teeth." He was not a bad-tempered man himself, but he was often the occasion of bad temper in others. He had his enemies, men who, with or without reason,


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 regarded him with strong antipathy, who hated the way he held his head and disliked the fashion of his canes. But he rarely put himself out for the sake of conciliating them. His own path had not been so smooth that he should feel the necessity of strewing rose-leaves under the feet of his fellow-creatures. There was, perhaps, more tenderness in his nature than he would have been willing to acknowledge, but it was not often called out.

While yet a very young man, he had loved and married Isabel Allen, a woman peculiarly suited to him. There had been no disillusionment during the three happy years that followed—hardworking years, dearer to him than the hope of heaven. When a malignant disease robbed him, at one stroke, of his wife and boy, he felt that he had had his day, and he doggedly set himself to do his duty in an arid path. Though an unpopular man he soon earned the title of "public-spirited citizen." People learned that while an appeal to his feelings was not apt to be successful, an appeal to his reason, and to his sense of justice was rarely made in vain. It was the latter appeal that he yielded to when he thought he had discovered that Edna Brown had fallen in love with him. It happened about five years after the death of his wife. He did not particularly admire Edna Brown, though he was aware that most men did, and he would greatly have preferred to lead his own life, unhampered by new


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 ties. But if Edna, who never concealed what she would have called her feelings, thought he could make her happy, he would not let his preferences stand in the way of her trying the experiment. Having married her, he was an excellent husband. Anything within reason that she wanted she might have. He was doing a good business in cotton, going to his office in the city every day, after the manner of suburbans—and in the course of time he built a very fine house, entirely in accordance with his wife's somewhat high-flying notions. Had Edna been exacting in the matter of sentiment he might not have found it so easy to content her, but as time went on it gradually dawned upon his plain, masculine intelligence, that perhaps, after all, Edna's infatuation had not been purely a tribute to his personal attractions. Such a discovery is not altogether pleasant to a man, even when the opposite state of things might be embarrassing. But William Pratt took it philosophically. He subjected his own physiognomy, mental and physical, to an impartial scrutiny, and he arrived at the conclusion that he had been a fool for his pains. That somewhat heavy countenance, with thick, bristling eyebrows and firm-set mouth, was not calculated to attract any woman, least of all an Edna Brown; that caustic tongue that had estranged so many friends was hardly adapted to wooing. He must have changed a good deal, he reflected drearily, since last he looked into Isabel's


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 eyes and read their adoration. Poor Edna! Perhaps after all he had cheated her out of what most women want. And from that time forth there was an added touch of kindness and solicitousness in his dealings with her, which filled Edna with satisfaction, as showing that she had kept her husband's affection longer than many women do.

There were three children, Mary, the eldest, being now fourteen. Their father was fond of them all in his undemonstrative way, though he loved them with an unconscious mental reservation. Once there was a discussion in his hearing on the subject of the English law of primogeniture. He took no part in the talk himself, but his mind reverted to the two-year-old boy he had lost so long ago, and it seemed to him that there was, after all, something peculiarly strong in theclaims of one's first-born. His children, in their turn, found hima sufficiently kind and indulgent father, though they were not on terms of intimacy with him. At Christmas-time he took pains to find out their secret wishes. If the little girls sometimes incurred their mother's displeasure by tearing or soiling their clothes he was ready to intercede for them. If Willie, the baby, bumped his head and roared with pain and temper, it was his father who patiently sopped the bruise with cold water and told him not to cry. Yet William Pratt was not one of those fathers whose children cling about their legs and stand on the rounds of


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 their chair, and the little ones thought nothing of going to bed without bidding him good-night.

With his nephews and nieces the case was not altogether different. They had a certain regard for him, largely induced by the transfer, from his pocket to theirs, of pennies, dimes, or quarters, the magnitude of the offering being carefully adapted to the age of the recipient. Heliked tosee them happy, and he did not know any other way of making them so. Yet there was not the same spontaneity in their affection for him, as in their love for Uncle Ben, whose small coins were not more migratory in their disposition than Uncle William's, but who had the gift of pinching their cheeks in a manner to rouse their deepest feelings, and who could tip them a wink worth more than money.

William's best friend was his mother, but even she was not his confidante. She had been very proud of his conquest of Edna Brown, the belle of Dunbridge, and she took his happiness for granted. If Old Lady Pratt had a favorite child, that child was William. She delighted in his sharp sayings almost as much as in his successful career and his singular uprightness. In fact the latter sometimes cost her a pang, so frequently did it conflict with her son's own interests.

Only a day or two after Jane's visit William came in to see his mother after church, as was his custom. His deaf sister, Betsy, who was just a little afraid of William, had trotted off, nothing