she is tired,
she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee
from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment. So, if she
can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her wickedness will run
off through her throat or the tips of her fingers. How many tragedies
find their peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and strenuous
bravuras! How many murders are executed in double-quick time upon the
keys which stab the air with their dagger-strokes of sound! What would
our civilization be without the piano? Are not Erard and Broadwood and
Chickering the true humanizers of our time? Therefore do I love to hear
the all-pervading _tum tum_ jarring the walls of little parlors in
houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets
and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to
live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I
not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small
unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors
and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same
familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which
throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been
floating, dead, in the brown stream which runs through the meadows by
her father's door,--or living, with that other current which runs
beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with wretched
weeds that were once in spotless flower?

Poor Elsie! She never sang nor played. She never shaped her inner life
in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as common
articulate speech to the deaf mute. Her only language must be in action.
Watch her well by day and by night, Old Sophy! watch her well! or the
long line of her honored name may close in shame, and the stately
mansion of the Dudleys remain a hissing and a reproach till its roof is
buried in its cellar!

CHAPTER XXIV.

ON HIS TRACKS.

"Abel!" said the old Doctor, one morning, "after you've harnessed
Caustic, come into the study a few minutes, will you?"

Abel nodded. He was a man of few words, and he knew that the "will you"
did not require an answer, being the true New-England way of rounding
the corners of an employer's order,--a tribute to the personal
independence of an American citizen.

The hired man came into the study in the course of a few minutes. His
fa