member of the New England Conscience Club; is president of it. Night and
day you can find him pegging away at Smith, panting with his labor,
sleeves rolled up, countenance all alive with enjoyment. He has got his
victim splendidly dragooned now. He can make poor Smith imagine that the
most innocent little thing he does is an odious sin; and then he sets to
work and almost tortures the soul out of him about it."

"Smith is the noblest man in all this section, and the purest; and yet is
always breaking his heart because he cannot be good! Only a conscience
could find pleasure in heaping agony upon a spirit like that. Do you
know my aunt Mary's conscience?"

"I have seen her at a distance, but am not acquainted with her. She
lives in the open air altogether, because no door is large enough to
admit her."

"I can believe that. Let me see. Do you know the conscience of that
publisher who once stole some sketches of mine for a 'series' of his, and
then left me to pay the law expenses I had to incur in order to choke him
off?"

"Yes. He has a wide fame. He was exhibited, a month ago, with some
other antiquities, for the benefit of a recent Member of the Cabinet's
conscience that was starving in exile. Tickets and fares were high, but
I traveled for nothing by pretending to be the conscience of an editor,
and got in for half-price by representing myself to be the conscience of
a clergyman. However, the publisher's conscience, which was to have been
the main feature of the entertainment, was a failure--as an exhibition.
He was there, but what of that? The management had provided a microscope
with a magnifying power of only thirty thousand diameters, and so nobody