of
vintage, and to love until either he or she dies, she sows the seeds of
death and disorder. Of course, I know that men and women who make promises
before priests know not at the time what they do; they find out
afterwards.

And so they were married, were John Lamb and Elizabeth Field; and probably
very soon thereafter Elizabeth had a premonition that this union only held
in store a glittering blade of steel for her heart. For she grew ill and
dispirited, and John found companionship at the alehouse, and came
stumbling home asking what the devil was the reason his wife couldn't meet
him with a smile and a kiss and a' that, as a dutiful wife should!

Elizabeth began to live more and more within herself. We often hear
foolish men taunt women with inability to keep secrets. But women who talk
much often do keep secrets--there are nooks in their hearts where the sun
never enters, and where those nearest them are never allowed to look. More
lives are blasted by secrecy than by frankness--ay! a thousand times. Why
should such a thing as a secret ever exist? 'Tis preposterous, and is
proof positive of depravity. If you and I are to live together, my life
must be open as the ether and all my thoughts be yours. If I keep back
this and that, you will find it out some day and suspect, with reason,
that I also keep back the other. Ananias and Sapphira met death, not so
much for simple untruthfulness as for keeping something back.

Elizabeth Lamb sought to protect herself against an unappreciative mate by
secrecy (perhaps she had to), and the habit grew until she kept secrets as
a business--she kept foolish little secrets. Did she get a letter from her
aunt, she read it in suggestive silence and then put it in her pocket. If
visitors called she never mentioned it, and when the children heard of it
weeks afterward they marveled.

And so shy little Mary Lamb wondered what it was her mother kept locked up
in the bottom drawer of the bureau, and Mary was told that children must
not ask questions--little girls should be seen and not heard.

At night, Mary would dream of the things that were in that drawer, and
sometimes great, big, black things would creep out through the keyhole and
grow bigger and bigger until they filled the room so full that you
couldn't breathe, and then little Mary would cry aloud and scream, and her
father would come with a strap that was kept on a nail behind the
kitchen-door and teach her better than to wa