's. I will
steal down stairs, and when they have ended, pop in, and it shall go
hard but I will have another song.

Parlor dark and empty. I fancied I heard Flora giggling somewhere, but
I might be mistaken. Yet the voices sounded as if they came from that
quarter--and--and I am sure I heard one note on the piano to give the
pitch. Hark! I hear the parlor door softly shut, and now the stairs
creak, and betray them stealing up, as they probably betrayed me
stealing down. They only blew out the lights and kept perfectly
still.--Witches!--Donkey!

Etty, your voice is still with me, clear, sweet, and penetrating, as
it was when you talked so eloquently to-night, in our dreamy ramble.--
What if I had early adopted her idea, that with every conscious power
is bound up both the duty and the pleasure of developing it? Might I
not now have reached higher ground, with health of body and mind?
Ambition is an unhealthy stimulus. A wretchedly uneasy guest too, in
the breast of an invalid. I would fain have a purer motive, which
shall dismiss or control it.

Etty,--what are the uses to be made of _her_ talents, while she lives
thus withdrawn into a world of her own? Certainly, she is wrong; I
shall convince her of it, when our friendship, now fairly planted, I
trust, shall have taken root. Now we shall be the best friends in the
world, and I will confide to her my--my--O, I am nodding over my
paper, and that click says the old clock at the stair-head is making
ready to announce midnight.

_Sept. 29th_. Capricious are the ways of womankind! Little Ugly is
more thoroughly self-occupied and undemonstrative than ever. I am
chagrined,--I think I am an ill-used man. I am downright angry and
have half a mind to flirt with Little Handsome, out of spite. Only
Miss Etty is too indifferent to care. I did but leave my old aunt to
Flora, and step back to remark that it was a pleasant Sunday, that the
sermon was homely and dull, and that the singing was discordant. Miss
Etty assented, but very coldly, and presently she bolted into an old
red house, and left me to go home by myself. When we started for
church again, she was among the missing, and we found her in the pew,
on our arrival. Thus pointedly to avoid me!--It might be accident,
however, for she did not refuse to sing from the same hymn-book with
me, and pointed to a verse on the other page, quaint, but
excellent. After all, old Watts has written the best hymns in the
language.

_Ev