ould have engendered. It was Egyptian
darkness; but her practised eye discerned, or thought it discerned, a
white cat upon the top of the high wooden fence. Keturah smiled a
ghastly smile, and fired. Now she never yet in her life threw anything
anywhere, under any circumstances, that did not go exactly in the
opposite direction from what she wanted to have it. This occasion proved
no exception. The cat jumped, and sprang over, and disappeared. The
stick went exactly into the middle of the fence. Keturah cannot suppose
that the last trump will be capable of making a louder noise. She stood
transfixed. One cry alone broke the hideous silence.

"_O_ Lord!" in an unmistakably Irish, half-wakened howl, from the open
window of the one-eyed servant's room. "Only that, and nothing more."

Keturah returned to her apartment, a sadder if not a wiser woman. Marius
among the ruins of Carthage, Napoleon at St. Helena, M'Clellan in
Europe, have henceforth and forever her sympathy.

She thinks it was _precisely_ five minutes after her return, during
which the happy stillness that seemed to rest upon nature without and
nature within had whispered faint promises of coming rest, that there
suddenly broke upon it a hoarse, deep, unearthly breathing. So hoarse,
so deep, so unearthly, and so directly underneath her window, that for
about ten seconds Keturah sat paralyzed. There was but one thing it
could be. A travelling menagerie in town had lost its Polish wolf that
very day. This was the Polish wolf.

The horrible panting, like the panting of a famished creature, came
nearer, grew louder, grew hoarser. The animal had found a bone in the
grass, and was crunching it in his ghastly way. Then she could hear him
sniffing at the door.

And Amram's room was on the lower story! Perhaps wolves climbed in at
windows!

The awful thought roused Keturah from the stupor of her terror. She was
no coward. She would face the fearful sight. She would call and warn him
at any risk. She faltered out upon the balcony. She leaned over the
railing. She gazed breathlessly down into the darkness.

A cow.

Another cow.

Three cows.

Keturah sat down on the window-sill in the calm of despair.

It was succeeded by a storm. She concludes that she was about five
seconds on the passage from her room to the garden. With "hair flotant,
and arms disclosed," like the harpies of heraldic device, she rushed up
to the invaders--and stopped. Exactly what was to b