“Never!” cried Sylvia.  “I would spurn him as chaff!”

“Some day when you meet Mr. Prentice, Sylvia,” I continued, further, “you will want to be very nice to him, and you might give him something new to parse.”

Sylvia studied me dubiously; the subject is not one that reassures her.

“Because the other day I heard a very great friend of Mr. Prentice’s say of him that when he was fifteen he could parse every sentence in Virgil and Homer.  And if he could do that then, think what he must he able to do now, and what a pleasure it must afford him!”

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.

It was about this time that Mrs. Walters returned from town, having left every window closed and every door locked, as is her custom.  She threw open her door and started in, but paused, being greeted by a snow-storm of goose feathers that filled the air and now drifted outward.

“Why, what on earth is the matter?” she exclaimed, peering in, blank with bewilderment.  Then her eyes caught sight of what had once been her bed.  Sitting up in it was the raccoon, his long black jaws bearded with down, his head and ears stuck about with feathers, and his eyes blazing green with defiance.