She reaches the ground after
an interval, steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop, and
embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms. After a little
wandering about among ash-bins and apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps
and cobwebs, she discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the _ignis
fatuus_ of her search. Something extremely cold crossing her shoeless
feet at this crisis suggests pleasant fancies of a rat. Keturah is
ashamed to confess that she has never in all the days of the years of
her pilgrimage set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon her
imagination, her conception of that animal is a cross between an
alligator and a jaguar. She stands her ground manfully, however, and is
happy to state that she did _not_ faint.

In the agitation consequent upon this incident she butters her bread
with the lard, and takes an enormous bite on the way up stairs. She
seeks no more refreshment that night.

One resort alone is left. With a despairing sigh she turns the great
faucet of the bath-tub and holds her head under it till she is upon the
verge of a watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope. Perhaps
about three or four o'clock she falls into a series of jerky naps, and
dreams that she is editor of a popular Hebrew magazine, wandering
frantically through a warehouse full of aspirant MSS. (chiefly from the
junior classes of theological seminaries) of which she cannot translate
a letter.

Of the tenth of Keturah's unearthly experiences,--of the number of times
she has been taken for a robber, and chased by the entire roused and
bewildered family, with loaded guns; of the pans of milk she has upset,
the crockery whose hopes she has untimely shattered, the skulls she has
cracked against open doors, the rocking-chairs she has stumbled over and
apostrophized in her own meek way; of the neighbors she has frightened
out of town by her perambulations; of the alarms of fire she has raised,
pacing the wood-shed with a lantern for exercise stormy nights; of all
the possible and impossible corners and crevices in which she has sought
repose, (she has slept on every sofa in every room in the house, and
once she spent a whole night on a closet shelf); of the amiable
condition of her mornings, and the terror she is fast becoming to
family. Church, and State, the time would fail her to tell. Were she to
"let slip the dogs of war," and relate a modicum of the agonies she
undergoes,--how the stamping of a ne