yes had no speculation in them. Her mouth--an honest mouth, that
was one mercy--quivered and shrank when she was addressed suddenly, as
if she felt herself to be a sort of foot-ball that the world was kicking
about at pleasure,--your gentlest smile might prove a blow. She seldom
spoke unless she were spoken to, and fell into long reveries, with her
eyes on the window or the coals. She wore a horrible sort of
ruff,--"illusion," I think Allis called it,--which, of all contrivances
that she could have chosen to encircle her sallow neck, was exactly the
most unbecoming. She was always knitting blue stockings,--I never
discovered for what or whom; and she wore her lifeless hair in the shape
of a small toy cartwheel, on the back of her head.

However, she brightened a little in the course of the first week, helped
Alison about the baby, kept herself out of my way, read her Bible and
the "Banner of Light" in about equal proportion, and became a mild,
inoffensive, and, on the whole, not unpleasant addition to the family.

She had been in the house about ten days, I think, when Alison, with a
disturbed face, confided to me that she had spent another wakeful night
with those "rats" behind the head-board; I had been down with a
sick-headache the day before, and she had not wakened me. I promised to
set a trap and buy a cat before evening, and was closing the door upon
the subject, being already rather late at the office, when the
expression of Gertrude Fellows's face detained me.

"If I were you, I--wouldn't--really buy a very expensive trap, Mr.
Hotchkiss. It will be a waste of money, I am afraid. I heard the noise
that disturbed Cousin Alison"; and she sighed.

I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be so good as to explain
herself.

"It's of no use," she said, doggedly. "You know you won't believe me.
But that makes no difference. They come all the same."

"_They_?" asked Allis, smiling. "Do you mean some of your spirits?"

The cold little woman flushed. "These are not _my_ spirits. I know
nothing about them. I did not mean to obtrude a subject so disagreeable
to you while I was in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in
which the Influences were so strong. I don't know what they mean, nor
anything about them, but just that they're here. They wake me up,
twitching my elbows, nearly every night."

"Wake you up _how_?"

"Twitching my elbows," she repeated, gravely.

I broke into a laugh, from which ne