all did I suspect the
vegetables of guile. But deep in the heart of a bland, mealy-mouthed
potato lurked cruel designs upon my fair reputation.

No sooner had I, in the most approved style of nursery good-breeding,
applied my fork to its surface, than the hardhearted thing executed a
wild _pirouette_ before my astonished eyes, and then flew on impish
wings across the room, dashing out its malicious brains, I am happy to
say, against the parlor-door, but leaving me in a half-comatose state,
stirred only by vague longings for a lodge with "proud Korah's troop,"
whose destination is unmistakably set forth in the "Shorter Catechism."

There is a possibility that I received my innate distrust of things by
inheritance from my maternal grandmother, whose holy horror at the
profanity they once provoked from a bosom-friend in her childhood was
still vivid in her old age.

It was on this wise. When still a pretty Puritan maiden, my grandame was
tempted irresistibly by the spring sunshine to the tabooed indulgence of
a Sunday-walk. The temptation was probably intensified by the
presence of the British troops, giving unwonted fascination to
village-promenades. Her confederate in this guilty pleasure was a
like-minded little saint; so there was a tacit agreement between them
that their transgression should be sanctified by a strict adherence to
religious topics of conversation. Accordingly they launched boldly upon
the great subject which was just then agitating church-circles in New
England.

Fortune smiled upon these criminals against the Blue Laws, until they
encountered a wall surmounted by hickory rails. Without intermitting the
discussion, Susannah sprang agilely up. Quoth she, balancing herself for
one moment upon the summit,--"No, no, Betsey! _I_ believe God is the
author of sin!" The next she sprang toward the ground; but a salient
splinter, a chip of depravity, clutched her Sunday-gown, and converted
her incontinently, it seems, into a confessor of the opposing faith; for
history records, that, following the above-mentioned dogma, there came
from hitherto unstained lips,--"The Devil!"

Time and space would, of course, be inadequate to the enumeration of all
the demonstrations of the truth of the doctrine of the absolute
depravity of things. A few examples only can be cited.

There is melancholy pleasure in the knowledge that a great soul has gone
mourning before me in the path I am now pursuing. It was only to-day,