must be changed at once. I sent out the servant for a fresh
bucketful from the sea, while I poured the polluted liquid from the jar.

Presently the bucket of water was brought in. It was unusually clear.
I filled the jar with it, and then, as bedtime was near, I left the
aquarium to settle down to business again. The next morning I hastened
to it in my night-gown, and was confronted by a ghastly spectacle. The
crabs lay dead on the bottom, stomachs upward; the prawns hung lifeless
and white from the rocks; the soldier-crabs were motionless, half out of
their shells; the sea-anemones had contracted themselves into buttons,
and most of them had dropped from their perches. Death had been rampant
during the night; but what could be the cause?

A sudden suspicion caused me to put a finger in the water and apply it
to my tongue. It was not salt-water at all, but had been taken fresh
from the cistern. That traitress servant-girl, to save her indolence a
few steps, had destroyed my aquarium!

I was too heart-broken to think of killing her; but she had killed
something in me which does not readily grow again. My trust in my
fellow-creatures was as shrunken and inanimate as the sea-anemones. We
left Southport soon after, and that was my last aquarium.

Let us turn to lighter matters. I accompanied my father and mother on
that pilgrimage to Old Boston which is described in Our Old Home. The
world does not know that it is to my presence on the little steamer
on the trip down the level river, through the Lincolnshire fens, with
nothing but the three-hundred-foot tower of St. Botolph's Church, in the
extreme distance, to relieve the tedium of a twenty-four-mile journey
made at the rate of never more than six miles per hour--it is not known,
I say, that to that circumstance is due my father's description of the
only incident which enlivened the way--the tragedy, namely, of the duck
family. For it was that tragedy which stood out clearest in my memory,
and when I learned, in Concord, that my father was preparing his paper
about Old Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, I besought him to insert an
account of the episode. The duck and her five ducklings had probably
seen the steamer many times before, and had acquired a contempt for its
rate of progression, imagining that it would always be easy to escape
from it. But, somehow, in their overweening security, they lingered on
this occasion a little too long, and we succeeded in running them