leaning against the partly open
door.

"Come here, Susie. The kids are snug and safe for the present, and I
want you."

"For shame, Ned! To call our darlings such a beastly name. Kids,
indeed! My sweetest, loveliest lambs!"

"There! Hear yourself! If I can see any choice of respectability
between kids and lambs, may I turn to a thoroughbred Southdown, and
take the blue ribbon at the next Fair. Beasts of the field, all of
them. The always-wide-awake-contrariness of womankind is a curious and
fearful thing. If I had called our beloved towheads, lambs, you would
have sworn through blue ruin that they were the cutest, spryest pair of
spotted kids, that ever skipped over a five-railed fence!"

"So much the worse for you, Ned Singleton, that you are such a hopeless
heathen; you do not even know where the Elect are appointed to stand,
at that great day when the sheep come up on the right hand of the Lord,
and the goats go down to the left. If you read your Bible more, I
should have less to teach you."

"Oh! but let me tell you, I thought of all that before I made up my
mind to marry the daughter of a Presbyterian preacher. I knew your dear
little blue-nose would keep the orthodox trail; and being one of the
Elect you could not get the points of the celestial compass mixed.
Don't you forget, that it is part of the unspoken marriage contract,
that the wife must not only keep her own soul white, but bleach her
husband's also; and no matter what a reprobate a man may be, he always
expects his better-half, by hook or by crook, to steer him into heaven."

He put his hands on his wife's shoulders, shook her, in token of
mastery, and kissed her.

"What do you want of my 'always-wide-awake-contrariness'? I have half a
mind not to help you out of your scrape; for of course you have mired
somewhere. What is the matter now, Ned?"

"Yes--stuck hard and fast; so my dear little woman, don't you go back
on your wedding-day promises, but just lend a helping hand. I don't
know what is to be done with that poor young woman in No. 19. One of
the under-wardens, Jarvis, sleeps this week right under her cell, and
he tells me that all night long she tramps up and down, without
cessation, like some caged animal. This is her third day in, and she
has not touched a morsel; though at Judge Dent's request I ordered some
extras given her. Jarvis said she was not sullen, but he thought it
proper to report to me that she seemed to act very strange