or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient
quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as Captain
Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with him,--to
cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New
England,--and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown
skin cuddled up in her best down beds and among her lavendered sheets no
more. She had learned but two words all that time,--Willoughby, and the
name of the town.

You may conjecture what heavenly peace came in when the Asian went out,
but there is no one to tell what havoc was wrought on board ship; in
fact, if there could have been such a thing as a witch, I should believe
that imp sunk them, for a stray Levantine brig picked her--still agile
as a monkey--from a wreck off the Cape de Verdes and carried her into
Leghorn, where she took--will you mind, if I say?--leg-bail, and
escaped from durance. What happened on her wanderings I'm sure is of
no consequence, till one night she turned up outside a Fiesolan villa,
scorched with malaria fevers and shaken to pieces with tertian and
quartan and all the rest of the agues. So, after having shaken almost to
death, she decided upon getting well; all the effervescence was gone;
she chose to remain with her beads in that family, a mysterious tame
servant, faithful, jealous, indefatigable. But she never grew; at ninety
she was of the height of a yard-stick,--and nothing could have been
finer than to have a dwarf in those old palaces, you know.

In my great-grandmother's home, however, the tradition of the Asian
sprite with her string of amber gods was handed down like a legend, and,
no one knowing what had been, they framed many a wild picture of the
Thing enchanting all her spirits from their beads about her, and calling
and singing and whistling up the winds with them till storm rolled round