to the contents. _The Spinster's Reticule_, for
so the name ran, came forth with no blare of journalistic trumpets
challenging approval from the towers of critical sagacity. It appeared
and lived. But between its cardboard covers the bruised heart of
JOANNA beats before the world. She shines most in these aphorisms. Her
private talk, too, has its own brilliancy, spun, as it was here and
there, out of a museful mind at the cooking of the dinner or of the
family accounts. She said of love that "it is the sputter of grease
in a frying-pan; where it falls the fire burns with a higher flame
to consume it."[1] Of man, that "he may navigate Mormon Bay, but he
cannot sail to Khiva Point." The meaning is too obvious it may be, but
the thought is well imaged.

She is delightful when she touches on life. "Two," she says, "may
sit at a feast, but the feast is not thereby doubled." And, again,
"Passion may lift us to Himalaya heights, but the hams are smoked in a
chimney." And this of the soul, "He who fashions a waterproof prevents
not the clouds from dripping moisture." Of stockings she observes
that, "The knitting-needles are long, but the turn of the heel is a
teaser." Here there is a delightful irony of which matrons and maids
may take note.

Such, then, was our JOANNA--JOANNA MERESIA SPRATT, to give her that
full name by which posterity is to know her--an ardent, bubbling,
bacon-loving girl-nature, with hands reaching from earth to the stars,
that blinked egregiously at the sight of her innocent beauty, and hid
themselves in winding clouds for very love of her.

CHAPTER III.

Sir JOHN SPRATT had fashions that were peculiarly his own. Vain it
were to inquire how, from the long-perished SPRATTS that went before
him, he drew that form of human mind which was his. Laws that are
hidden from our prying eyes ordain that a man shall be the visible
exemplar of vanished ages, offering here and there a hook of
remembrance, on which a philosopher may hang a theory for the world's
admiring gaze. Far back in the misty past, of which the fabulists
bear record, there have swum SPRATTS within this human ocean, and of
these the ultimate and proudest was he with whose life-story we are
concerned. It was his habit to carry with him on all journeys a bulky
note-book, the store in which he laid by for occasions of use the
thoughts that thronged upon him, now feverishly, as with the exultant
leap of a rough-coated canine companion, released fro