y with a villainous word for the most courteous and gentle of
all whom she may meet, pray for that man.

The blue-blooded shrew is by no means uncommon. Watch one of this kind
yelling on a racecourse in tearful and foul-mouthed rage and you will
have a few queer thoughts about human nature. Then there is the
ladylike shrew. Ah, that being! What has she to answer for? She is
neat, low-spoken, precise; she can purr like a cat, and she has the
feline scratch always ready too. Pity the governess, the servant, the
poor flunkey whom she has at her mercy, for their bread is earned in
bitterness. "My lady" does not raise her voice; she can give orders
for the perpetration of the meanest of deeds without varying the
silken flow of her acrid tongue; but she is bad--very bad; and I think
that, if Dante and Swedenborg were at all near being true prophets,
there would be a special quarter in regions dire for the lady-like
shrew.

* * * * *

I must distinctly own that the genuine shrew endeavours to make life
more or less unhappy for both sexes. Usually we are apt to think of
the shrew as resembling the village scolds who used to be promptly
ducked in horse-ponds in the unregenerate days; but the scold was an
individual who was usually chastised for making a dead-set at her
husband alone. The real shrew is like the puff-adder or the
whip-snake--she tries to bite impartially all round; and she is often
able to bite in comparative silence, but with a most deadly effect.
The vulgar shrieker is a deplorable source of mischief, but she cannot
match the reticent stabber who is always ready, out of sheer
wickedness, to thrust a venomed point into man, woman, or child. I
shall give my readers an extreme instance towards which they may
probably find it hard to extend belief. I am right however, and have
fullest warrant for my statement. I learn on good authority, and with
plenitude of proof, that trained nurses are rather too frequently
subjected to the tender mercies of the shrew. Nothing is more grateful
to a cankered woman than the chance of humiliating some one who
possesses superior gifts of any description, and a well-bred lady who
has taken to the profession of nursing is excellent "game." Thus I
find that delicate young women of gentle nurture have been sent away
to sleep in damp cellars at the back of great town-houses; they have
had to stay their necessarily fastidious appetites with cold broken
fo