g the
auditors who were not interested in the subject of the oration!--and
there must always have been some among the number so situated.

One remembers how Shelley got rid of the old woman down in Conway, and
wonders why the ruse was never tried upon Macaulay by some of his
victims. Shelley, it is said, was once riding in a stage in that region,
and the only passenger beside himself was an old woman with two huge
baskets filled with onions and cabbage respectively. She was huge
herself and much incumbered with fat, and the day was excessively warm.
Shelley was one of those delicate mortals who have been known to "die of
a rose in aromatic pains," and after a while the presence of the old
woman nearly drove him to distraction. He pretended that it had quite
done so, and suddenly throwing himself into the bottom of the stage he
glared at the old woman and shouted:--

"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,--
ALL MURDERED."

Before the last two words--which he rendered with more than an actor's
effect--were fairly out of his mouth, the old woman by her shrieks had
summoned the guard, and was released from the company of the madman.
Shelley was often induced by his friends to show them how he got rid of
the old woman, and the exhibition always called for uproarious applause.
There is a hint in it for any well-bred company who may be bored to the
point of extinction by a distinguished member. The only wonder is that
in some cases the sudden madness is not real rather than assumed.

Hawthorne was eminently capable of being bored to this point of
desperation, and his mother and elder sister saved themselves from any
danger of this kind by voluntarily living the lives of recluses. Julian
Hawthorne tells us:--

"His mother, a woman of fine gifts but extreme sensibility lost her
husband in her twenty-eighth year; and from an exaggerated, almost
Hindoo-like, construction of the law of seclusion which the public
taste of that day imposed upon widows, she withdrew entirely from
society and permitted the habit of solitude to grow upon her to
such a degree that she actually remained a strict hermit to the end
of her long life, or for more than forty years after Captain
Hawthorne's death