records broken love-dreams will ever know of it. With this precious
angel I am in full sympathy. He has done too much of that kind of
writing for me not to feel the cruel pangs of the long list of
disappointments with which his books are blotted.

Well, I arose the next morning after my experimental bath, heavy-eyed,
heavy-hearted, and altogether blue as indigo. Cousin Dempster saw this,
and his generous heart seized upon a remedy.

"Let us go down to Pleasure Bay," says he. "What do you think of a day's
crabbing?"

"Crabbing?" says I, "just as if I didn't feel crabbed enough already. Do
you want me to keep it up all day?"

Dempster laughed; so did E. E.; just as if I'd said something awful
funny, which I wasn't in the least conscious of, not having a spark of
fun left in me since that salt-water deluge and its consequences.

"Oh," says he, as good-natured as pie, "there is nothing like Pleasure
Bay when one has the blues--a lunch under the trees, and a boat before
the breeze."

I stopped him; the dear, good fellow was launching off into poetry
without knowing it; association with genins is doing everything with
him. There is no knowing where he might have ended, if I hadn't lifted
my forefinger, for a whole gust of poetry was riling up in his earthly
nature like yeast in a baking of bread.

"I'll go to Pleasure Bay," says I, "but, for goodness sake, don't try
that sort of thing again; genius isn't catching, and though you have
married into our family, don't expect that it will spread like an
epidemic into yours, because it won't."

"Why not?" says he; "is there nothing in association?"

"Well, I can't exactly decide," says I; "strange things do happen in
that direction. I have heard of young women marrying literary men who
never wrote a line worth reading before, who burst out into full-blown
geniuses right in the honeymoon. But it is wonderful how much their
style was like their husbands'. Of course, those must be cases of
especial affinity. When a woman has ransacked a poor fellow's heart, she
naturally begins to pillage his brain, and I reckon he must like it at
first; but after that, he subsides into himself, and she subsides into
herself, and somehow she writes just as she did before, and so does he!"

"Then there are plenty of young ladies who carry their ambition and
their flirtations in among the newspaper people and stray Bohemians,"
says E. E., kindling up to the subject; "for every time they get