s, and began again.

"'Theodore,' said Seraphina.

"'Seraphina,' said Theodore." Jump the second! There he was,--not
Theodore, but the beetle,--whirring round the lamp, and buzzing down
into her lap. Hadn't he been burned in the light, drowned in the ink,
speared with the pen, and crushed by falling from the window? Yet there
he was, or the ghost of him, fluttering his inky wings into her very
eyes, and walking leisurely across the smooth, fair page that waited to
be inscribed with Seraphina's woe. Nerved by despair, Keturah did a
horrible thing. Never before or since has she been known to accomplish
it. She put him down on the floor and stepped on him. She repented of
the act in dust and ashes. Before she could get across the room to close
the window ten more had come to his funeral. To describe the horrors of
the ensuing hour she has no words. She put them out of the window,--they
came directly back. She drowned them in the wash-bowl,--they fluttered,
and sputtered, and buzzed up into the air. She killed them in
corners,--they came to life under her very eyes. She caught them in her
handkerchief and tied them up tight,--they crawled out before she could
get them in. She shut the cover of the wash-stand down on them,--she
looked in awhile after and there was not one to be seen. All ten of the
great blundering creatures were knocking their brains out against the
ceiling. After the endurance of terrors that came very near turning her
hair gray, she had pushed the last one out on the balcony, shut the
window, and was gasping away in the airless room, her first momentary
sense of security, when there struck upon her agonized ear a fiendish
buzzing, and three of them came whirling back through a crack about as
large as a knitting-needle. No _mortal_ beetle could have come through
it. Keturah turned pale and let them alone.

The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at last restored, and the
exhausted sufferer began to think of sleep. At this moment she heard a
sound before which her heart sank like lead. You must know that Keturah
has a very near neighbor, Miss Humdrum by name. Miss Humdrum is a--well,
a very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed servant and
three cats; and the sound which Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum's cats.

Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself with a huge oaken log,
and sallied out into the garden, with a horrible _sang-froid_ that only
long familiarity with her errand c