bureaus and wardrobes, and when she had spent the first evening
hour counterfeiting the softly whimpered quavers of a little screech-owl
that snivelled its woes from a tree in the back-yard, the happy thought
came to her innocent young mind to try on the best she could find of her
mistress's gowns and millinery. By hook and by crook, combined with a
blithe assiduity, she managed to open doors and drawers, and if mimicry
is the heaven of aspiring laziness, the maid presently stood
unchallenged on the highest plateau of a sluggard's bliss. She minced
before the mirror, she sank into chairs, she sighed and whined, took the
attitudes given or implied by the other Daphne's portrait down-stairs,
and said weary things in a faint, high key.

And then--whether the contagion was in the clothing she had put on, or
whether her make-up and her acting were so good as to deceive Calliope
herself--inspiration came; the lonely reveler was moved to write.
Poetry? No! "Miss it ag'n!" She began a letter intended to inform "Mr.
S. Cunnelius Leggett," that while alike by her parents and by Mrs. March
she was forbidden to see "genlmun frens," an unannounced evening
visitor's risks of being shot by Mr. March first, and the question of
his kinship to the late Enos settled afterward, were probably--in the
popular mind--exaggerated. The same pastime enlivened the next evening
and the next. She even went farther and ventured into verse. Always as
she wrote she endeavored to impersonate in numerous subtleties of
carriage the sweet songstress whose gowns she had contrived--albeit
whose shoes she still failed--to get into. And so, with a conscience
void of offence, she was preparing herself to find out, what so many of
us already know, that playing even with the muse's fire is playing with
fire, all the same.

XLIX.

MEETING OF STOCKHOLDERS

At sunrise of the twenty-second, Barbara started from her pillow, roused
by the jarring thunder of a cannon. As it pealed a second time Fannie
drew her down.

"It's only Charlie Champion in the square firing a salute. Go to sleep
again."

As they stepped out after breakfast for a breath of garden air, they saw
John March a short way off, trying to lift the latch of Parson Tombs's
low front gate. He tried thrice and again, but each time he bent down
the beautiful creature he rode would rear until it seemed as if she must
certainly fall back upon her rider. The pastor had come out on his
gallery, w