nce to herself was darker in her mind than murder
committed on anybody else would have been. And now she sat deliberating,
not on the limit of the verbal punishment she meant to inflict--that
gave her no concern--but on her ability to do the matter justice. Even
as a tyrannical backwoods school-master straightens his long beech-rod
relishfully before applying it.

Not that Mrs. Anderson was silent all this time. She was sighing and
groaning in a spasmodic devotion. She was "seeking strength from above
to do her whole duty," she would have told you. She was "agonizing" in
prayer for her daughter, and she contrived that her stage-whisper
praying should now and then reach the ears of its devoted object.
Humphreys remained seated, pretending to read the copy of "Josephus,"
but watching the coming storm with the interest of a connoisseur. And
while he remained Jonas determined to stay, to keep Julia in
countenance, and he beckoned to Cynthy to stay also. And Samuel
Anderson, who loved his daughter and feared his wife, fled like a coward
from the coming scene. Everybody expected Mrs. Anderson to break out
like a fury.

But she knew a better plan than that. She felt a new device come like an
inspiration. And perhaps it was. It really seemed to Jonas that the
devil helped her. For instead of breaking out into commonplace scolding,
the resources of which she had long since exhausted, she dropped upon
her knees, and began to pray for Julia.

No swearer ever curses like the priest who veils his personal spites in
official and pious denunciations, and Mrs. Anderson had never dealt out
abuse so roundly and terribly and crushingly, as she did under the guise
of praying for the salvation of Julia's soul from well-deserved
perdition. But Abigail did not say perdition. She left that to weak
spirits. She thought it a virtue to say "hell" with unction and
emphasis, by way of alarming the consciences of sinners. Mrs. Anderson's
prayer is not reportable. That sort of profanity is too bad to write.
She capped her climax--even as I have heard a revivalist pray for a
scoffer that had vexed his righteous soul--by asking God to convert her
daughter, or if she could not be converted to take her away, that she
might not heap up wrath against the day of wrath. For that sort of
religious excitement which does not quiet the evil passions, seems to
inflame them, and Mrs. Anderson was not in any right sense sane. And the
prayer was addressed more to