 | NIGHT-WATCHES. Men, women, and ghosts |  |
3. NIGHT-WATCHES.
Keturah wishes to state primarily that she is good-natured.
She thinks it necessary to make this statement,
lest, after having heard her story, you should,
however polite you might be about it, in your heart of
hearts suspect her capable not only of allowing her
angry passions to rise, but of permitting them to boil
over “in tempestuous fury wild and unrestrained.”
If it were an orthodox remark, she would also add,
from like motives of self-defence, that she is not in the
habit of swearing.
Are you accustomed, O tender-hearted reader, to
spend your nights, as a habit, with your eyes open or
shut? On the answer to this question depends her
sole hope of appreciation and sympathy.
She begs you will understand that she does not
mean you, the be-ribboned and be-spangled and be-rouged
frequenter of ball and soirée, with your well-taught,
drooping lashes, or wide girl's eyes untamed
and wondering, your flushing color, and your pulse up
to a hundred. You are very pretty for your pains, —
O, to be sure you are very pretty! She has not the
heart to scold you, though you are dancing and singing
young nights, that never come but once, — though you
are dancing and singing and flirting yourselves merrily
into your grave. She would like to put in a plea before
the eloquence of which Cicero and Demosthenes,
Beecher and Sumner, should pale like wax-lights before
the sun, for the new fashion said to be obtaining
in New York, that the soirée shall give place to the
matinée, at which the guests shall assemble at four
o'clock in the afternoon, and are expected to go home
at seven or eight. That would be not only civilized,
it would be millennial.
But Keturah is perfectly aware that you will do as
you will. If the excitement of the “wee sma' hours
ayont the twal” prove preferable to a quiet evening at
home, and a good, Christian, healthy sleep after it,
why the “sma' hours” it will be. If you will do it, it
is “none of her funerals,” as the small boy remarked.
Only she particularly requests you not to insult her by
offering her your sympathy. Wait till you know what
forty-eight mortal, wide-awake, staring, whirring, unutterable
hours mean.
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
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 is n'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
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. Physicians from
everywhere under the sun, who have proved the
fickleness of hyoscyamus, of hops, of Dover's powders,
of opium, of morphine, of laudanum, of hidden virtues
of herbs of the field, and minerals from the rock, and
gases from the air; who know the secrets of all the
pitying earth, and, behold, it is vanity of vanities, shall
with the new universal panacea and blessing to
suffering humanity.
And Keturah can keep a resolution.
Her literary occupation disposed of, in the summary
manner referred to, she runs through the roll of her
reserve force, and their name is Legion. She composes
herself, in an attitude of rest, with a handkerchief
tied over her eyes to keep them shut, blows her
lamp out instead of screwing it out, strangles awhile
in the gas, and begins to repeat her alphabet, which,
owing to like stern necessity, she has fortunately never
forgotten. She says it forward; she says it backward;
she begins at the middle and goes up; she begins at
the middle and goes down; she rattles it through in
French, she groans it through in German, she falters
it through in Greek. She attempts the numerationtable,
flounders somewhere in the quadrillions, and forgets
where she left off. She watches an interminable
flock of sheep jump over a wall till her head spins.
There always seem to be so many more where the last
one came from. She listens to oar-beats, and drumbeats,
and heart-beats. She improvises sonatas and
gallopades, oratorios and mazourkas. She perpetrates
the title and first line of an epic poem, goes through
the alphabet for a rhyme, and none appearing, she repeats
the first line by way of encouragement. But all
in vain.
With a silence that speaks unspeakable things, she
may be felt. At the bottom of the stairs she steps
with her whole weight flat upon something that
squirms, and is warm, and turns over, and utters a
cry that makes night hideous. O, nothing but the cat,
that is all! The pantry proves to be well stocked
with bread, but not another mortal thing. Now, if
there is anything Keturah particularly dislikes, it is
dry bread. Accordingly, with a remark which is intended
for Love's ear alone, she gropes her way to the
cellar door, which is unexpectedly open, pitches headfirst
into the cavity, and makes the descent of half the
stairs in an easy and graceful manner, chiefly with her
elbows. She reaches the ground after an interval,
steps splash into a pool of water, knocks over a mop,
and embraces a tall cider barrel with her groping arms.
After a little wandering about among ash-bins and
apple-bins, reservoirs and coal-heaps and cobwebs, she
discovers the hanging-shelf which has been the ignis
fatuus of her search. Something extremely cold crossing
her shoeless feet at this crisis suggests pleasant
fancies of a rat. Keturah is ashamed to confess that
she has never in all the days of the years of her pilgrimage
set eyes upon a rat. Depending solely upon
her imagination, her conception of that animal is a
cross between an alligator and a jaguar. She stands
her ground manfully, however, and is happy to state
that she did not faint.
In the agitation consequent upon this incident she
bite on the way up stairs. She seeks no more refreshment
that night.
One resort alone is left. With a despairing sigh
she turns the great faucet of the bath-tub and holds
her head under it till she is upon the verge of a
watery grave. This experiment is her forlorn hope.
Perhaps about three or four o'clock she falls into a
series of jerky naps, and dreams that she is editor of
a popular Hebrew magazine, wandering frantically
through a warehouse full of aspirant MSS. (chiefly
from the junior classes of theological seminaries) of
which she cannot translate a letter.
Of the tenth of Keturah's unearthly experiences, —
of the number of times she has been taken for a robber,
and chased by the entire roused and bewildered
family, with loaded guns; of the pans of milk she has
upset, the crockery whose hopes she has untimely
shattered, the skulls she has cracked against open
doors, the rocking-chairs she has stumbled over and
apostrophized in her own meek way; of the neighbors
she has frightened out of town by her perambulations;
of the alarms of fire she has raised, pacing the wood-shed
with a lantern for exercise stormy nights; of all
the possible and impossible corners and crevices in
which she has sought repose, (she has slept on every
sofa in every room in the house, and once she spent a
whole night on a closet shelf); of the amiable condition
of her mornings, and the terror she is fast becoming
to tell. Were she to “let slip the dogs of war,” and
relate a modicum of the agonies she undergoes, —
how the stamping of a neighbor's horse on a barn floor
will drive every solitary wink of sleep from her eyes
and slumber from her eyelids; the nibbling of a mouse
in some un-get-at-able place in the wall prove torture;
the rattling of a pane of glass, ticking of a
clock, or pattering of rain-drops, as effective as a cannon;
a guest in the “spare room” with a musical
“love of a baby,” something far different from a blessing,
and a tolerably windy night, one lengthened
vigil long drawn out, — the liberal public would cry,
“Forbear!” It becomes really an interesting science
to learn how slight a thing will utterly deprive an unfortunate
creature of the great necessity of life; but
this article not being a scientific treatise, that must
be left to the sympathizing imagination.
Keturah feels compelled, however, to relate the
story of two memorable nights, of which the only
wonder is that she has lived to tell the tale.
Every incident is stamped indelibly upon her brain.
It is wrought in letters of fire. “While memory
holds a seat in this distracted globe,” it shall not,
cannot be forgotten.
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
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 was n'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
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,
about as large as a knitting-needle. No mortal beetle
could have come through it. Keturah turned pale
and let them alone.
The clock was striking eleven when quiet was at
last restored, and the exhausted sufferer began to
think of sleep. At this moment she heard a sound
before which her heart sank like lead. You must
know that Keturah has a very near neighbor, Miss
Humdrum by name. Miss Humdrum is a — well, a
very excellent and pious old lady, who keeps a one-eyed
servant and three cats; and the sound which
Keturah heard was Miss Humdrum's cats.
Keturah descended to the wood-shed, armed herself
with a huge oaken log, and sallied out into the garden,
with a horrible sang-froid that only long familiarity
with her errand could have engendered. It was
Egyptian darkness; but her practised eye discerned,
or thought it discerned, a white cat upon the top of
the high wooden fence. Keturah smiled a ghastly
smile, and fired. Now she never yet in her life
threw anything anywhere, under any circumstances,
that did not go exactly in the opposite direction from
what she wanted to have it. This occasion proved no
exception. The cat jumped, and sprang over, and
disappeared. The stick went exactly into the middle
of the fence. Keturah cannot suppose that the last
trump will be capable of making a louder noise. She
stood transfixed. One cry alone broke the hideous
silence.
“O Lord!” in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened
howl, from the open window of the one-eyed servant's
room. “Only that, and nothing more.”
Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not
a wiser woman. Marius among the ruins of Carthage,
Napoleon at St. Helena, M'Clellan in Europe, have
henceforth and forever her sympathy.
She thinks it was precisely five minutes after her
return, during which the happy stillness that seemed
to rest upon nature without and nature within had
whispered faint promises of coming rest, that there
suddenly broke upon it a hoarse, deep, unearthly
breathing. So hoarse, so deep, so unearthly, and so
directly underneath her window, that for about ten
seconds Keturah sat paralyzed. There was but one
thing it could be. A travelling menagerie in town
had lost its Polish wolf that very day. This was the
Polish wolf.
The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished
creature, came nearer, grew louder, grew hoarser.
The animal had found a bone in the grass, and was
crunching it in his ghastly way. Then she could
hear him sniffing at the door.
And Amram's room was on the lower story! Perhaps
wolves climbed in at windows!
The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor
of her terror. She was no coward. She would face
the fearful sight. She would call and warn him at
any risk. She faltered out upon the balcony. She
into the darkness.
A cow.
Another cow.
Three cows.
Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of
despair.
It was succeeded by a storm. She concludes that
she was about five seconds on the passage from her
room to the garden. With “hair flotant, and arms
disclosed,” like the harpies of heraldic device, she
rushed up to the invaders — and stopped. Exactly
what was to be done? Three great stupid, browsing,
contented cows versus one lone, lorn woman. For
about one minute Keturah would not have wagered
her fortune on the woman. But it is not her custom
to “say die,” and after some reflection she ventured
on a manful command.
“Go away! Go! go!” The stentorian remark
caused a result for which she was, to say the least,
unprepared. The creatures coolly turned about and
walked directly up to her. To be sure. Why not?
Is it not a part of our outrageous Yankee nomenclature
to teach cows to come to you when you tell them
to go away? How Keturah, country born and bred,
could have even momentarily forgotten so clear and
simple a principle of philology, remains a mystery to
this day. A little reflection convinced her of the only
logical way of ridding herself of her guests. Accordingly,
again.
“Come here, sir! Come, good fellow! Wh-e-e!
come here!”
Three great wooden heads lifted themselves slowly,
and three pairs of soft, sleepy eyes looked at her, and
the beasts returned to their clover and stood stock-still.
What was to be done? You could go behind and
push them. Or you could go in front and pull them
by the horns.
`Neither of these methods exactly striking Keturah's
fancy, she took up a little chip and threw at them;
also a piece of coal and a handful of pebbles. These
gigantic efforts proving to be fruitless, she sat down on
the grass and looked at them. The heartless creatures
resisted even that appeal.
At this crisis of her woes one of Keturah's many
brilliant thoughts came to her relief. She hastened
upon the wings of the wind to her infallible resort, the
wood-shed, and filled her arms up to the chin with
pine knots. Thus equipped, she started afresh to the
conflict. It is recorded that out of twenty of those
sticks, thrown with savage and direful intent, only one
hit. It is, however, recorded that the enemy dispersed,
after being valiantly pursued around the house,
out of the front gate (where one stuck, and got through
with the greatest difficulty), and for a quarter of a
mile down the street. In the course of the rout Keturah
tripped on her dress only six times, and fell flat
variety to the scene. A particularly frisky and clover-loving
white cow, whose heart yearned after the apples
of Sodom, turned about in the road without any
warning whatever and showed fight. Keturah adopted
a sudden resolution to return home “across lots,”
and climbed the nearest stone-wall with considerable
empressement. Exactly half-way over she was surprised
to find herself gasping among the low-hanging
boughs of a butternut-tree, where she hung like Absalom
of old, between heaven and earth. She would
like to state, in this connection, that she always had too
much vanity to wear a waterfall; so she still retains
a portion of her original hair.
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.
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,
about the event, Ketury.”
“I?” said Keturah, weeping, “I did n'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 have n'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
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.”
Once, on one of these lonely rambles, Keturah
found away in the fields, under the shadow of an old
stone-wall, a baby's grave. It had no headstone to
tell its story, and the weeds and brambles of many
years had overgrown it. Keturah is not of a romantic
disposition, especially on her midnight tramps, but
she sat down by the little nameless thing, and looked
from it to the arch of eternal stars that, summer and
winter, seed-time and harvest, kept steadfast watch
over it, and was very still.
It is one of the standing grievances of her life that
Amram, while never taking the trouble to go and look,
insists upon it that was nothing but somebody's pet
dog. She knows better.
On this particular night, Keturah, in coming up
from the garden to return to the house, had a dim impression
that something crossed the walk in front of
her and disappeared among the rustling trees. The
impression was sufficiently strong to keep her sitting
up for half an hour at her window, under the feeling
cure. She has indeed been asked why she did not
reconnoitre the rustling trees upon the spot. She
considers that would have been an exceedingly poor
stroke of policy, and of an impolitic thing Keturah is
not capable. She sees far and plans deep. Supposing
she had gone and been shot through the head,
where would have been the fun of her burglars? To
yield a life-long aspiration at the very moment that it
is within grasp, was too much to ask even of Keturah.
Words cannot describe the sensations of the moment,
when that half-hour was rewarded by the sight of two
stealthy, cat-like figures, creeping out from among the
trees. A tall man and a little man, and both with
very unbanditti-like straw-hats on.
Now, if Keturah has a horror in this world, it is
that delicate play of the emotions commonly known
as “woman's nonsense.” And therefore did she sit
still for three mortal minutes, with her burglars making
tracks for the kitchen window under her very
eyes, in order to prove to herself and an incredulous
public, beyond all shadow of doubt or suspicion, that
they were robbers and not dreams; actual flesh and
blood, not nightmares; unmistakable hats and coats in
a place where hats and coats ought not to be, not
clothes-lines and pumps. She tried hard to make
Amram and the Paterfamilias out of them. Who
knew but they also, by some unheard-of revolution in
all the laws of nature, were on an exploring expedition
conviction that they were innocent and unimpeachable
neighbors, cutting the short way home across the fields
from some remarkably late prayer-meeting. She agonized
after the belief that they were two of Patsy's
sweethearts, come for the commendable purpose of
serenading her.
In fact they were almost in the house before this
remarkable female was prepared to trust the evidence
of her own senses.
But when suspense gloomed into certainty, Keturah
is happy to say that she was grandly equal to the occasion.
She slammed open her blinds with an emphasis,
and lighted her lamp with a burnt match.
The men jumped, and dodged, and ran, and hid
behind the trees, in the most approved manner of
burglars, who flee when no woman pursueth; and
Keturah, being of far too generous a disposition to
enjoy the pleasure of their capture unshared, lost no
time in hammering at Amram's door.
“Amram!”
No answer.
“Amram!”
Silence.
“Am-ram!”
“Oh! Ugh! Who — ”
Silence again.
“Amram, wake up! Come out here — quick!”
“O-o-oh, yes. Who 's there?”
“I.”
“I?”
“Keturah.”
“Keturah?”
“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 might n'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
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 was n'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
did n'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.
| NIGHT-WATCHES. Men, women, and ghosts | |