let them go,--on the contrary, insisted on their staying,
and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or as
Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in his title-page, and, having
divested them of the one essential and perfectly fitting garment,
indispensable in the mildest climates, nailed the same on the
church-door as we do the banns of marriage, _in terrorem_.

[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I
looked at our landlady, I saw that "the water stood in her eyes," as it
did in Christiana's when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and
that the school-mistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation,
as you remember.]

That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story,--said the young fellow whom
they call John. I abstained from making Hamlet's remark to Horatio, and
continued.

Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an
old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things
thought the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the
front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it would
be all the better for scraping. There happened to be a microscopist in
the village who had heard the old pirate story, and he took it into his
head to examine the crust on this door. There was no mistake about it;
it was a genuine historical document, of the Ziska drum-head
pattern,--a real _cutis humarca_, stripped from some old Scandinavian
filibuster,--and the legend was true.

My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and financial
question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a similar
document. Behind the pane of plate-glass which bore his name and title
burned a modest lamp, signifying to the passers-by that at all hours of
the night the slightest favors (or fevers) were welcome. A youth who
had freely partaken of the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates,
following a moth-like impulse very natural under the circumstances,
dashed his fist at the light and quenched the meek luminary,--breaking
through the plate-glass, of course, to reach it. Now I don't want to
go into _minutiae_ at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go
through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle,
to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a
sausage-machine without looking the worse for it. The Professor gathered
up the fragments of glass, and with them