relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted
family.

A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins's
proneness to adventure by the fact that she derived her chief
mental nourishment from the Police Gazette and the
Fireside Weekly; but her lot was cast in a circle where such
insinuations were not likely to be heard, and where the title-role
in blood-curdling drama had long been her recognized right.

"Yes," she was now saying, her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza,
"you may not believe it, Miss Bunner, and I don't know's I
should myself if anybody else was to tell me, but over a year
before ever I was born, my mother she went to see a gypsy fortune-
teller that was exhibited in a tent on the Battery with the green-
headed lady, though her father warned her not to--and what you
s'pose she told her? Why, she told her these very words--says she:
'Your next child'll be a girl with jet-black curls, and she'll
suffer from spasms.'"

"Mercy!" murmured Ann Eliza, a ripple of sympathy running down
her spine.

"D'you ever have spasms before, Miss Mellins?" Evelina asked.

"Yes, ma'am," the dress-maker declared. "And where'd you
suppose I had 'em? Why, at my cousin Emma McIntyre's wedding, her
that married the apothecary over in Jersey City, though her mother
appeared to her in a dream and told her she'd rue the day she done
it, but as Emma said, she got more advice than she wanted from the