up the ghost! A complaint of the head and shoulders was the
sudden cause of the event which has rendered the unhappy
subscriber the most miserable of men.

"'BLUEBEARD.'

"Every one of the women are calendared in this delightful, this
pathetic, this truly virtuous and tender way; and can you suppose that a
man who wrote such sentiments could be a _murderer_, miss?"

"Do you mean to say that he did not _kill_ them, then?" said Anne.

"Gracious goodness, Anne, kill them! they died all as naturally as I
hope you will. My blessed husband was an angel of goodness and kindness
to them. Was it _his_ fault that the doctors could not cure their
maladies? No, that it wasn't! and when they died the inconsolable
husband had their bodies embalmed in order that on this side of the
grave he might never part from them."

"And why did he take you up in the tower, pray? And why did you send me
in such a hurry to the leads? and why did he sharpen his long knife, and
roar out to you to COME DOWN?"

"Merely to punish me for my curiosity,--the dear, good, kind, excellent
creature!" sobbed the widow, overpowered with affectionate recollections
of her lord's attentions to her.

"I wish," said Sister Anne, sulkily, "that I had not been in such a
hurry in summoning my brothers."

"Ah!" screamed Mrs. Bluebeard, with a harrowing scream, "don't,--don't
recall that horrid, fatal day, miss! If you had not misled your
brothers, my poor, dear, darling Bluebeard would still be in life,
still--still the soul's joy of his bereaved Fatima!"

Whether it is that all wives adore husbands when the latter are no more,
or whether it is that Fatima's version of the story is really the
correct one, and that the common impression against Bluebeard is an
odious prejudice, and that he no more murdered his wives than you and I
have, remains yet to be proved, and, indeed, does not much matter for
the understanding of the rest of Mrs. B.'s adventures. And though people
will say that Bluebeard's settlement of his whole fortune on his wife,
in event of survivorship, was a mere act of absurd mystification, seeing
that he was fully determined to cut her head off after the honeymoon,
yet the best test of his real intentions is the profound grief which the
widow manifested for his death, and the fact that he left her mighty
well to do in the world.

If any one were to leave you or me a fortune, my dear friend, would we
be too anxious to rake