son; but, quick as he is, Miss Alice's admirers are quicker, and he shortly returns furious and empty handed. I am so petrified at the catastrophe my well-meaning efforts have brought about that I am utterly incapable of moving away, so when the governor returns, and casts his eye over the house in search of the waiting-maid to whom he attributes the ovation, he beholds me—nightgown, nightcap, open mouth, and all. He shakes his fist wildly at me, and the gesture breaks the spell. I turn to hide myself in bed, but before I can reach it the governor is before me. I receive a box on the ear that makes me see two enraged parents, two crabs, two jugs of cider, two nightcaps; then, with a thunderstorm of abuse and wrath bellowing about me, I am hustled out of the room and down into Jack's—a narrow slip of a place overlooking the back garden, and which is only—oh, horror!—partitioned off the governor's chamber. There I am left crabless, supperless, tearless, to reflect on the extreme folly of ever meddling in other people's affairs; no matter what one's intentions may be, since the better they are the worse the results seem to be. Alice comes by-and-by and condoles with me—as well she may, since her sins have brought down upon me the sentence of three days' imprisonment to the house.
Finally, for I shall have plenty of time for reflecting on my woes, I fall asleep. I scarcely seem to have reached the land of Nod, when I wake suddenly and open my eyes widely on—what! At first I am divided between a doubt whether it is papa come to finish me off, or that I at last face to face with a ghost; it is so difficult to make out anything in this half-light (for the green window blinds are very thick and dark), and it cannot yet be more than very early morning. Do ghosts seize you by the arm and shake you till your teeth rattle in your head, and the breath is nearly out of your body? Do ghosts———
