her I have never known. But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself. It may be that she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wishing to regain a favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her that she was grossly ineligible for membership in a Home Study Club.
The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss Caroline's heresy. Excitement and adverse criticism were almost universally aroused. It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to that of her love for strong drink. About most writers one could be permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within realms of the idlest speculation.
There were but two of us, I believe, who did not promptly condemn Miss Caroline's violence of speech—two men of varying parts. Westley Keyts frankly said he had never been able to "get into" Shakspere, and considered it, as a book for reading purposes, inferior to "Cudjo's Cave," which he had read three
