n
the trap-door of its retreat. And Mrs. Grampus was a wonderful woman.
Talk about death's-head! Jason B. Grampus would have welcomed one in
place of that pallid creature in a night-dress, who met him when he came
in weavingly.

Mrs. Grampus, who was known to her husband's inner consciousness as
Sophia, was a slender, blue-eyed woman, soft of voice and by day gentle
of manner. Her health was not perfect. She knew this, and so did every
one she met. While not an invalid, she in her imagination trembled on
the edge of invalidism, and upon this subject she was almost loquacious.
She was domestic in her tastes, and ambitious and devoted to her home
and family.

She was a model wife and mother, and this, too, she knew; so did her
family and friends, for this subject was second in her topics of
conversation only to the state of her health; and, furthermore, she was
peculiar and almost original in the perfection to which she had brought
the fine art of nagging.

Let it not be imagined that she scolded, or said small, mean things, or
used any of the processes of the ordinary nagger. Her methods were
refined, studied, calculated, and correct. Her style of day-nagging was,
to be explicit, to maintain perfect silence as to the grievance under
which she suffered--indeed, this was often a profound secret from the
first to the last; to adopt the look and bearing of a Christian martyr
on the way to the stake, and to keep this demonstration up for days
without a gleam of interruption. She shed no tears, made no reproaches;
she just looked her agony, sitting, walking, doing anything. This was by
day. But at night! How is it that women so have the gift of speech at
night? Mrs. Grampus had it in a marvelous degree, and it was the speech
which is a thing to dread, penetrating and long-continued. The nerves of
Jason B. Grampus were gradually giving way. Some of the finest old
gentlemen in every large city in the country know that one's physical
condition differs with moods and seasons, and that what may be endured
at one time cannot be at another. This lesson was brought forcibly to
Jason B. Grampus one morning. He had passed his usual evening at the
club, had gone home at the usual hour, and had encountered even more
difficulty than usual in discovering the keyhole. He made more than the
ordinary degree of noise, and had encountered even more than the usual
hour or two of purgatory, subsequently. He came down town in the morning
heavy-