I would not imbitter Sylvia's joy by intimating that perhaps Mr.
Prentice's studious regard for much of the poetry that he published was
based upon the fact that he could not parse it.


There has been the most terrible trouble with the raccoon.

This morning the carpenter tied him in my yard as usual; but some time
during the forenoon, in a fit of rage at his confinement, he pulled the
collar over his head and was gone. Whither and how long no one knew;
but it seems that at last, by dint of fences and trees, he attained to
the unapproachable distinction of standing on the comb of Mrs.
Walters's house--poor Mrs. Walters, who has always held him in such
deadly fear! she would as soon have had him on the comb of her head.
Advancing along the roof, he mounted the chimney. Glancing down this,
he perhaps reached the conclusion that it was more like nature and a
hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to
produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and
friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at
the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove
of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but
in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is
not clear; but at last he climbed to the bed, white as no fuller could
white it, and he dripping with soot. Here the ground beneath him was
of such a suspicious and unreasonable softness that he apparently
resolved to dig a hole and see what was the matter. In the course of
his excavation he reached Mrs. Walters's feather-bed, upon which he
must have fallen with fresh violence, tooth and nail, in the idea that
so many feathers could not possibly mean feathers only.