s, "was
invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she
thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling
by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor.
Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to
her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you
disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'"

This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought
that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps
she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted
to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few
flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this
story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it
not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration
of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I
wonder how she survived it!

At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following
July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the
ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my
designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved,
gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and
companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models
of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat
for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical
acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm--by
adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture--so he arranged
with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction.
Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries
of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally
presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and
nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but
conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the
model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed,
broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats
which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside
form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of
hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once,
p