Listen to her mournful tale; and, while you listen, let your head become fountains of water, and your eyes rivers of tears for her, and for all who are doomed to reside in her immediate vicinity.

“Tired nature’s sweet restorer,” as the newspapers, in a sudden and severe poetical attack, remarked of Jeff Davis, “refuses to bless” Keturah, except as her own sweet will inclines her.  They have a continuous lover’s quarrel, exceedingly bitter while it rages, exceedingly sweet when it is made up.  Keturah attends a perfectly grave and unimpeachable lecture,—­the Restorer pouts and goes off in a huff for twenty-four hours.  Keturah undertakes at seven o’clock a concert,—­ announced as Mendelssohn Quintette, proving to be Gilmore’s Brassiest,—­and nothing hears she of My Lady till two o’clock, A. M. Keturah spends an hour at a prayer-meeting, on a pine bench that may have heard of cushions, but certainly has never seen one face to face; and comes home at eight o’clock to the pleasing discovery that the fair enslaver has taken some doctrinal offence, and vanished utterly.

Though lost to sight she’s still to memory dear, and Keturah penitently betakes herself to the seeking of her in those ingenious ways which she has learned at the school of a melancholy experience.  A table and a kerosene lamp are brought into requisition; also a book.  If it isn’t the Dictionary, it is Cruden’s Concordance.  If these prove too exciting, it is Edwards on the Will.  Light reading is strictly forbidden.  Congressional Reports are sometimes efficacious, as well as Martin F. Tupper, and somebody’s “Sphere of Woman.”

There is one single possibility out of ten that this treatment will produce drowsiness.  There are nine probabilities to the contrary.  The possibility is worth trying for, and trying hard for; but if it results in the sudden flight of President Edwards across the room, a severe banging of the “Sphere of Woman” against the wall, and the total disappearance of Cruden’s Concordance beneath the bed, Keturah is not in the least surprised.  It is altogether too familiar a result to elicit remark.  It simply occasions a fresh growth to a horrible resolution that she has been slowly forming for years.

Some day she will write a book.  The publishers shall nap over it, and accept it with pleasure.  The drowsy printers shall set up its type with their usual unerring exactness.  The proof-readers shall correct it in their dreams.  Customers in the bookstores shall nod at the sight of its binding.  Its readers shall dose at its Preface.  Sleepless old age, sharp and unrelieved pain, youth sorrowful before the time, shall seek it out, shall flock unto the counters of its fortunate publishers (she has three firms in her mind’s eye; one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Philadelphia; but who the happy men are to be is not yet definitely decided), who shall waste their inheritance in distributing it throughout the length and breadth of a grateful continent.