s sediment.

So, if she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her
wickedness will run off through her throat or the tips of her fingers.
How many tragedies find their peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades
and strenuous bravuras! How many murders are executed in double-quick
time upon the keys which stab the air with their dagger-strokes of
sound! What would our civilization be without the piano? Are not Erard
and Broadwood and Chickering the true humanizers of our time? Therefore
do I love to hear the all-pervading tum tum jarring the walls of little
parlors in houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out
on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist
is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore
complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of
the small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine
flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue
the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys,
which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords would not
have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the
meadows by her father's door,--or living, with that other current
which runs beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with
wretched weeds that were once in spotless flower?

Poor Elsie! She never sang nor played. She never shaped her inner life
in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as common
articulate speech to the deaf mute. Her only language must be in action.
Watch her well by day and by night, old Sophy! watch her well! or
the long line of her honored name may close in shame, and the stately
mansion of the Dudleys remain a hissing and a reproach till its roof is
buried in its cellar!

CHAPTER XXIV. ON HIS TRACKS.

"Able!" said the old Doctor, one morning, "after you've harnessed
Caustic, come into the study a few minutes, will you?"

Abel nodded. He was a man of few words, and he knew that the "will you"
did not require an answer, being the true New-England way of rounding
the corners of an employer's order,--a tribute to the personal
independence of an American citizen.

The hired man came into the study in the course of a few minutes.
His face was perfectly still, and he waited to be spoken to; but the
Doctor's eye detected a certain meaning in his expression, which looked
as if