Doctor Bernastrokius, our neighbor in the next street?"

Poor Mr. Engelman looked frightened.

"Don't be angry, my dear friend," he said softly.

"Angry?" repeated Mr. Keller, more furiously than ever. "My good
Engelman, you never were more absurdly mistaken in your life! I am
delighted. Exactly what I expected, exactly what I predicted, has come to
pass. Put down your pipe! I can bear a great deal--but tobacco smoke is
beyond me at such a crisis as this. And do for once overcome your
constitutional indolence. Consult your memory; recall my own words when
we were first informed that we had a woman for head-partner."

"She was a very pretty woman when I first saw her," Mr. Engelman
remarked.

"Pooh!" cried Mr. Keller.

"I didn't mean to offend you," said Mr. Engelman. "Allow me to present
you with one of my roses as a peace-offering."

_"Will_ you be quiet, and let me speak?"

"My dear Keller, I am always too glad to hear you speak! You put ideas
into my poor head, and my poor head lets them out, and then you put them
in again. What noble perseverance! If I live a while longer I do really
think you will make a clever man of me. Let me put the rose in your
buttonhole for you. And I say, I wish you would allow me to go on with my
pipe."

Mr. Keller made a gesture of resignation, and gave up his partner in
despair. "I appeal to _you,_ David," he said, and poured the full flow of
his learning and his indignation into my unlucky ears.

Mr. Engelman, enveloped in clouds of tobacco-smoke, enjoyed in silence
the composing influence of his pipe. I said, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir,"
at the right intervals in the flow of Mr. Keller's eloquence. At this
distance of time, I cannot pretend to report the long harangue of which I
was made the victim. In substance, Mr. Keller held that there were two
irremediable vices in the composition of women. Their dispositions
presented, morally speaking, a disastrous mixture of the imitativeness of
a monkey and the restlessness of a child. Having proved this by copious
references to the highest authorities, Mr. Keller logically claimed my
aunt as a woman, and, as such, not only incapable of "letting well
alone," but naturally disposed to imitate her husband on the most
superficial and defective sides of his character. "I predicted, David,
that the fatal disturbance of our steady old business was now only a
question of time--and there, in Mrs. Wagner's ridiculous instructions, is
the fu