rave
and unimpeachable lecture,--the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff
for twenty-four hours. Keturah undertakes at seven o'clock a concert,--
announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore's
Brassiest,--and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o'clock, A. M.
Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may
have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face;
and comes home at eight o'clock to the pleasing discovery that the fair
enslaver has taken some doctrinal offence, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she's still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently
betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she
has learned at the school of a melancholy experience. A table and a
kerosene lamp are brought into requisition; also a book. If it isn't the
Dictionary, it is Cruden's Concordance. If these prove too exciting, it
is Edwards on the Will. Light reading is strictly forbidden.
Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F.
Tupper, and somebody's "Sphere of Woman."

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will
produce drowsiness. There are nine probabilities to the contrary. The
possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for; but if it results
in the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe
banging of the "Sphere of Woman" against the wall, and the total
disappearance of Cruden's Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in
the least surprised. It is altogether too familiar a result to elicit
remark. It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that
she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day _she_ will write a book. The publishers shall nap over it, and
accept it with pleasure. The drowsy printers shall set up its type with
their usual unerring exactness. The proof-readers shall correct it in
their dreams. Customers in the bookstores shall nod at the sight of its
binding. Its readers shall dose at its Preface. Sleepless old age, sharp
and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out,
shall flock unto the counters of its fortunate publishers (she has three
firms in her mind's eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in
Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely
decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it
throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent. Physicians
fr