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However, she returned victorious over the silent dew-laden fields and down into the garden paths, where she paced for two hours back and forth among the aromatic perfumes of the great yellow June lilies. There might have been a bit of poetry in it under other circumstances, but Keturah was not poetically inclined on that occasion. The events of the night had so roused her soul within her, that exercise unto exhaustion was her sole remaining hope of sleep.

At about two o’clock she crawled faintly upstairs again, and had just fallen asleep with her head on the window-sill, when a wandering dog had to come directly under the window, and sit there and bark for half an hour at a rake-handle.

Keturah made no other effort to fight her destiny. Determined to meet it heroically, she put a chair precisely into the middle of the room, and sat up straight in it, till she heard the birds sing. Somewhere about that epoch she fell into a doze with one eye open, when a terrific peal of thunder started her to her feet. It was Patsy knocking at the door to announce that her breakfast was cold.

In the ghastly condition of the following day the story was finished and sent off. It was on this occasion that the patient and long-enduring editor ventured mildly to suggest, that when, by a thrilling and horrible mischance, Seraphina’s lovely hand came between a log of wood and the full force of Theodore’s hatchet, the result might have been more disastrous than the loss of a finger-nail. Alas! even his editorial omniscience did not know—how could it?—the story of that night. Keturah forgave him.

It is perhaps worthy of mention that Miss Humdrum appeared promptly at eight o’clock the next morning, with her handkerchief at her eyes.

“My Star-spangled Banner has met with her decease, Ketury.”

“Indeed! How very sad!”

“Yes. She has met with her decease. Under very peculiar circumstances, Ketury.”

“Oh!” said Ketury, hunting for her own handkerchief; finding three in her pocket, she brought them all into requisition.

“And I feel it my duty to inquire,” said Miss Humdrum, “whether it may happen that you know anything about the event, Ketury.”

“I?” said Keturah, weeping, “I didn’t know she was dead even! Dear Miss Humdrum, you are indeed afflicted.”

“But I feel compelled to say,” pursued Miss Humdrum, eying this wretched hypocrite severely, “that my girl Jemimy did hear somebody fire a gun or a cannon or something out in your garden last night, and she scar’t out of her wits, and my poor cat found cold under the hogshead this morning, Ketury.”

“Miss Humdrum,” said Keturah, “I cannot, in justice to myself, answer such insinuations, further than to say that Amram never allows the gun to go out of his own room. The cannon we keep in the cellar.”

“Oh!” said Miss Humdrum, with horrible suspicion in her eyes. “Well, I hope you haven’t it on your conscience, I’m sure. Good morning.”

It had been the ambition of Keturah’s life to see a burglar. The second of the memorable nights referred to crowned this ambition by not only one burglar, but two. She it was who discovered them, she who frightened them away, and nobody but she ever saw them. She confesses to a natural and unconquerable pride in them. It came about on this wise:—

It was one of Keturah’s wide-awake nights, and she had been wandering off into the fields at the foot of the garden, where it was safe and still. There is, by the way, a peculiar awe in the utter hush of the earliest morning hours, of which no one can know
who has not familiarized himself with it in all its moods. A solitary walk in a solitary place, with the great world sleeping about you, and the great skies throbbing above you, and the long unrest of the panting summer night, fading into the cool of dews, and pure gray dawns, has in it something of what Mr. Robertson calls “God’s silence.”