eating to us,--it was his great effort of
the season on a bill for the protection of horn-pout in Little Muddy
River,--I caught her making the signs that set him going. At a slight
tap of her knife against her plate, he got all ready, and presently I saw
her cross her knife and fork upon her plate, and as she did so, pop! went
the small piece of artillery. The Member of the Haouse was just saying
that this bill hit his constitooents in their most vital--when a pellet
hit him in the feature of his countenance most exposed to aggressions and
least tolerant of liberties. The Member resented this unparliamentary
treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the small aggressor a
good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement which had caused his
wrath and breaking it into splinters. The Boy blubbered, the Young Girl
changed color, and looked as if she would cry, and that was the last of
these interruptions.

I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it
answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a deliberative
assembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little
engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that
threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her
small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed
to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into
the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all at
once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the
story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied me
of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very
little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from
that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a
jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party,
without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with
his popgun.

How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's audacious
contrivance for regulating our table-talk! Her brain is tired half the
time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to what a quieter person
would like well enough, or at least would not be annoyed by. It amused
her to invent a scheme for managing the headstrong talkers, and also let
off a certain spirit of mischief which in some of these nervous girls
shows itself in much m