“Very well, sir:  I intend you shall know better than to upset mine, I’ll show you.”

In fact, things had come to that pass that I had mentally resolved to “show” Charlie a great many things.  I firmly believed that the secret of the power that Charlie’s mother had exercised over her household, and still exercised over him in memory, lay in the fact that she made them all afraid of her:  so I firmly resolved that they should all be afraid of me, poor little me!  It is true, I was but twenty, and she was fifty; I was but a pocket edition of a woman, and she was a Webster Unabridged; I had little meek blue eyes, that dropped to the ground in the most shamefaced manner if a body did but look at me, and she had hard, cold gray eyes, that not only looked straight at you, but right through you.  Still, I hoped, notwithstanding these trifling drawbacks, to make myself very awe-inspiring by dint of a grand assumption of spirit.

To put it into very plain language, I resolved to bully Charlie off his hobby.  He had thrown his mother at my head (figuratively speaking, of course) until, if she had been present in propria persona, I should have been tempted to try Hiawatha’s remarkable feat with his grandmother, and throw her up against the moon.  But as I could not revenge myself upon her personally, I began to lay deep and subtle plans for inducing Charlie to leave her to her repose.

As the veritable bell which, in the days when “mother did it,” had acted as a sort of Gabriel’s trump, was still extant, minus clapper and handle, I was enabled to provide myself with its fac-simile.  Armed with this instrument of retribution, I laid me down to sleep by Charlie’s side, gloating in anticipation over my ripening scheme of vengeance.

It was a rare thing for me to wake up before Charlie, but I did manage to do so on the morning in question, by dint, I think, of a powerful mental resolution to that effect made the night before.  I raised myself very softly, so as not to disturb my husband’s gentle slumbers, and, possessing myself of my big bell, I laid on with a will, raising such a clatter in the quiet morning air that Charlie fairly bounded into the middle of the room before he in the least comprehended where it came from.

“In the name of God, Lulie, what is the meaning of that?” he exclaimed, looking at me as if he half doubted my sanity.

“That’s the way mother did it, Charlie,” I replied placidly enough, and, replacing my big bell on the table, I settled myself on my pillow once more, ostensibly to go to sleep again—­in reality to have my laugh out in a quiet fashion, for it was enough to have made the very bed-posts laugh to see Charlie’s funny look of astonishment and indignation.  But of course he couldn’t say a word, you know.

For two more mornings I clattered my bell about his precious old head, and then he paid me to quit, and after that began riding his hobby at a little slower gait.