It was a night in June,—­sultry, gasping, fearful.  Keturah went to her own room, as is her custom, at the Puritanic hour of nine.  Sleep, for a couple of hours, being out of the question, she threw wide her doors and windows, and betook herself to her writing-desk.  A story for a magazine, which it was imperative should be finished to-morrow, appealed to her already partially stupefied brain.  She forced her unwilling pen into the service, whisked the table round into the draught, and began.  In about five minutes the sibyl caught the inspiration of her god, and heat and sleeplessness were alike forgotten.  This sounds very poetic, but it wasn’t at all.  Keturah regrets to say that she had on a very unbecoming green wrapper, and several ink-spots on her fingers.

It was a very thrilling and original story, and it came, as all thrilling and original stories must come, to a crisis.  Seraphina found Theodore kissing the hand of Celeste in the woods.  Keturah became excited.

“‘O Theodore!’ whispered the unhappy maiden to the moaning trees.  ’O Theodore, my—­’”

Whir! buzz! swosh! came something through the window into the lamp, and down squirming into the ink-bottle.  Keturah jumped.  If you have half the horror of those great June beetles that she has, you will know how she jumped.  She emptied the entire contents of the ink-bottle out of the window, closed her blinds, and began again.

“‘Theodore,’ said Seraphina.

“‘Seraphina,’ said Theodore.”  Jump the second!  There he was,—­not Theodore, but the beetle,—­whirring round the lamp, and buzzing down into her lap.  Hadn’t he been burned in the light, drowned in the ink, speared with the pen, and crushed by falling from the window?  Yet there he was, or the ghost of him, fluttering his inky wings into her very eyes, and walking leisurely across the smooth, fair page that waited to be inscribed with Seraphina’s woe.  Nerved by despair, Keturah did a horrible thing.  Never before or since has she been known to accomplish it.  She put him down on the floor and stepped on him.  She repented of the act in dust and ashes.  Before she could get across the room to close the window ten more had come to his funeral.  To describe the horrors of the ensuing hour she has no words.  She put them out of the window,—­they came directly back.  She drowned them in the wash-bowl,—­they fluttered, and sputtered, and buzzed up into the air.  She killed them in corners,—­they came to life under her very eyes.  She caught them in her handkerchief and tied them up tight,—­they crawled out before she could get them in.  She shut the cover of the wash-stand down on them,—­she looked in awhile after and there was not one to be seen.  All ten of the great blundering creatures were knocking their brains out against the ceiling.  After the endurance of terrors that came very near turning her hair gray, she had pushed the last one out on the balcony, shut the window, and was gasping away in the airless room, her first momentary sense of security, when there struck upon her agonized ear a fiendish buzzing, and three of them came whirling back through a crack about as large as a knitting-needle.  No mortal beetle could have come through it.  Keturah turned pale and let them alone.