sensation as if a dentist were killing the nerves of twenty-five teeth at
once with hot irons, or cold ones, which would hurt rather worse.

The Deacon swallowed something with a spasmodic effort, and recovered
pretty soon and received the congratulations of his friends. There were
different versions of the expressions he had used at the onset of his
complaint,--some of the reported exclamations involving a breach of
propriety, to say the least,--but it was agreed that a man in an attack
of neuralgy wasn't to be judged of by the rules that applied to other
folks.

The company soon after this retired from the supper-room. The
mansion-house gentry took their leave, and the two-story people soon
followed. Mr. Bernard had stayed an hour or two, and left soon after he
found that Elsie Venner and her father had disappeared. As he passed by
the dormitory of the Institute, he saw a light glimmering from one of its
upper rooms, where the lady-teacher was still waking. His heart ached,
when he remembered, that, through all these hours of gayety, or what was
meant for it, the patient girl had been at work in her little chamber;
and he looked up at the silent stars, as if to see that they were
watching over her. The planet Mars was burning like a red coal; the
northern constellation was slanting downward about its central point of
flame; and while he looked, a falling star slid from the zenith and was
lost.

He reached his chamber and was soon dreaming over the Event of the
Season.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MORNING AFTER.

Colonel Sprowle's family arose late the next morning. The fatigues and
excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were followed by a
natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading symptom. The sun
shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle when the Colonel
first found himself sufficiently awake to address his yet slumbering
spouse.

"Sally!" said the Colonel, in a voice that was a little husky,--for he
had finished off the evening with an extra glass or two of "Madary," and
had a somewhat rusty and headachy sense of renewed existence, on greeting
the rather advanced dawn,--"Sally!"

"Take care o' them custard-cups! There they go!"

Poor Mrs. Sprowle was fighting the party over in her dream; and as the
visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into
another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden
jar had jumped into one