fever of
agitation.

"A minute or two yet, good gentlemen, please! I'm a'most ready. I'm
a-waiting to get out my purple gownd."

"All right, missus," was the muffled answer.

The "purple gownd" was kept in this very ex-room of Brother Jarrum's hid
in a safe place between some sheets of newspaper. Had Mrs. Peckaby kept
it open to the view of Peckaby, there's no saying what grief the robe
might not have come to, ere this. Peckaby, in his tantrums, would not
have been likely to spare it. She put it on, and hooked it down the
front, her trembling fingers scarcely able to accomplish it. That it was
full loose for her she was prepared to find; she had grown thin with
fretting. Then she put on a shawl; next, her bonnet; last some green
leather gloves. The shawl was black, with worked coloured corners--a
thin small shawl that hardly covered her shoulders; and the bonnet was a
straw, trimmed with pink ribbons--the toilette which had long been
prepared.

"Good-bye, Peckaby," said she, going in when she was ready, "You've said
many a time as you wished I was off, and now you have got your wish. But
I don't want to part nothing but friends."

"Good-bye," returned Peckaby, in a hearty tone, as he turned himself
round on his bed. "Give my love to the saints."

To find him in this accommodating humour was more than she had bargained
for. A doubt had crossed her sometimes, whether, when the white donkey
did come, there might not arise a battle with Peckaby, ere she should
get off. This apparently civil feeling on his part awoke a more social
one on hers; and a qualm of conscience darted across her, suggesting
that she might have made him a better wife had she been so disposed. "He
might have shook hands with me," was her parting thought, as she
unlocked the street door.

The donkey was waiting outside with all the patience for which donkeys
are renowned. It had been drawn up under a sheltering ledge at a door or
two's distance, to be out of the rain. Its two conductors were muffled
up, as befitted the inclemency of the night, something like their voices
appeared to have been. Mrs. Peckaby was not in her sober senses
sufficiently to ask whether they were brothers from the New Jerusalem,
or whether the style of costume they favoured might be the prevailing
mode in that fashionable city; if so, it was decidedly more useful than
elegant, consisting apparently of hop sacks, doubled over the head and
over the back.

"Ready, missus