"You'll never write verses," said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad
occasion, "if you don't understand arithmetic. Why, it's the science of
numbers. Come now, if ninety hogsheads--"

"Oh-h! I'm so tired of hogsheads; mayn't it be firkins this time?"

And, for fancy's sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.

Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter
must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.

Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her
heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted
that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided
palpitation, a flutter.

That night she lay awake and listened to it.

It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata
(only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she
put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway
knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss
Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics
changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and
rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her
throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her
down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the
floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much;
she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her
ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.