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“O-o-oh, yes. Who’s there?”

“I.”

“I?”

“Keturah.”

“Kefurah?”

“Amram, be quick, or we shall all have our throats cut! There are some men in the garden.”

“Hey?”

” Men in the garden!”

“Men?”

“In the garden! “

“Garden?”

Keturah can bear a great deal, but there comes a limit even to her proverbial patience. She burst open the door without ceremony, and is under the impression that Amram received a shaking such as even his tender youth was a stranger to. It effectually woke him to consciousness, as well as to the gasping and particularly senseless remark, “What on earth was she wringing his neck for?” As if he mightn’t have known! She has the satisfaction of remembering that he was asked in return, “Did he expect a solitary unprotected female to keep all his murderers away from him, as well as those wolves she drove off the other night?”

However, there was no time to be wasted in tender words, and before a woman could have winked, Amram made his appearance dressed and armed and sarcastically incredulous. Keturah grasped the pistol, and followed him at a respectful distance. Stay in the house and hold the light? Catch her! She would take the light with her, and the house too, if necessary, but she would be in at the death.

She wishes Mr. Darley were on hand, to immortalize the picture they made, scouring the premises after those disobliging burglars,—especially Keturah, in the green wrapper, with her hair rolled all up in a huge knob on top of her head, to keep it out of the way, and her pistol held out at arm’s-length, pointed falteringly, directly at the stars. She will inform the reader confidentially—tell it not in Gath—of a humiliating discovery she made exactly four weeks afterward, and which she has never before imparted to a human creature,—it wasn’t loaded.

Well, they peered behind every door, they glared into every shadow, they squeezed into every crack, they dashed into every corner, they listened at every cranny and crevice, step and turn. But not a burglar! Of course not. A regiment might have run away while Amram was waking up.

Keturah thinks it will hardly be credited that this hopeful person dared to suggest and dares to maintain that it was Cats !

But she must draw the story of her afflictions to a close. And lest her “solid” reader’s eyes reject the rambling recital as utterly unworthy the honor of their notice, she is tempted to whittle it down to a moral before saying farewell. For you must know that Keturah has learned several things from her mournful experience.

1. That every individual of her acquaintance, male and female, aged and youthful, orthodox and heretical, who sleeps regularly nine hours out of the twenty-four, has his or her own especial specimen recipe of a “perfectly harmless anodyne” to offer, with advice thrown in.

2. That nothing ever yet put her to sleep but a merciful Providence.

3. A great respect for Job.

4. That the notion commonly and conscientiously received by very excellent people, that wakeful nights can and should be spent in prayer, religious meditation, and general spiritual growth, is all they know about it. Hours of the extremest bodily and mental exhaustion, when every nerve is quivering as if laid bare, and the surface of the brain burning and whirling to agony, with the reins of control let loose on every rebellious and every senseless thought, are not the times most likely to be chosen for the purest communion with God. To be sure. King David “remembered Him upon his bed, and meditated upon Him in the night-watches.” Keturah does not undertake to contradict Scripture, but she has come to the conclusion that David was either a very good man, or he didn’t lie awake very often.

But, over and above all, haec fabula docet :

5. That people who can sleep when they want to should keep Thanksgiving every day in the year.