y, it becomes my delicate duty
to hastily sketch a scene which the masculine pen cannot too carefully
touch upon. It being one of the principles of woman's nature that some
relaxations must be admitted in her toilet before she can revive from
syncope, the second dowager commenced to relieve the fainting fair one
of such articles of fashionable addenda as might retard her recovery.
She took off her side-curls and back-hair and laid them upon a table;
with great care she removed her upper teeth and placed them upon a
chair; softly wetting a corner of her handkerchief in her mouth she
effectually wiped away the eyebrows and a part of the cheek of the
young sufferer; and she was proceeding to make other dissections which
I shall dismiss with the remark that they are merely matters of form,
when the patient gave a gentle sigh as she rested in her mother's arms,
and says the mother to the dowager:--

"There, Mrs. Jobbins, I guess you needn't do any more." Mrs. Jobbins
gave a sagacious look at the patient, and says she:

"Very true, mem; she is getting better. It wont take us many minutes to
reconstruct her."

"I beg your parding, Mrs. Jobbins," says the maternal, shaking her
cap,--"I beg your parding Mrs. Jobbins; but your language is
ineddicated, highly; you should say 'restore' her."

Mrs. Jobbins straightened herself up, with a glare, and says she:
"Perhaps, mem, you can teach _me_ eddication, and my own daughter a
teacher these two years in the public schools! The ideor! I repeat
it--to reconstruct her--put her together again."

"Restore," says the maternal, savagely.

"Reconstruct!" screamed Mrs. Jobbins.

"You're a artful, ignorant old copperhead!" howled the maternal,
dropping her daughter's head upon the floor.

"And you're a spiteful, stuck-up, toothless old--ab'litionist!!" yelled
the dowager, stamping until her snuff-box hopped out of her pocket.

Drawn to the room by the noise, a hard old nut, a retired foreman of
old "Sixty," stuck his head in at the door, and says he: "What are you
old fools scrimmaging about? You're keeping the swarry back."

Both the old ladies made at him at once to know which, in his opinion,
was the right word,--'Reconstruct,' or 'Restore?'

The old nut took a thoughtful bite of tobacco, and says he: "Let the
girl herself tell you when she _revives_."

Revive was the word, my boy; and while the old women were quarrelling
over the two terms aforesaid, poor nature got tired of w