soul of that devoted child?  Nay.  She would have whined about slyness, and cunning hints, and greediness, and the probabilities of utter ruin and disgrace overtaking underhand schemers, until that child would have been stunned, puzzled, deprived of self-respect, and rendered entirely wretched.  Long ago I heard of a doleful one who turned suddenly on a merry boy who was playing on the floor.  “You’re going straight to perdition!” observed the dolorous one; and the light went out of that boy’s life for a time.  A gladsome party of young folk may be instantly wrecked by the doleful shrew’s entrance; and, if she cannot attract attention to herself amid a gathering even of sensible, cheerful adults, she will probably break up the evening by dint of a well-timed fit of spasms or something similar.  Dickens made Mrs. Gummidge very funny; but the Gummidge of real life is not merely a limp, “lorn” creature—­she is a woman who began by being unhealthily vain, and ends by being venomously malignant.  I do not think that many people have passed through life very far without meeting with a specimen of the dolorous shrew, and I hope in all charity that the creature is not in the immediate circle of any one who reads this.  In impassioned moments, when I have reckoned up all the misery caused by this species, I have been inclined to wish that every peculiarly malign specimen could be secured at the public expense in a safe asylum.

The aggressive shrew is usually the wife of some phlegmatic man; she insults him at all hours and on all subjects, and she establishes complete domination over him until she happens to touch his conscience fairly, and then he probably crushes her by the sudden exertion of latent moral force.  Shall I talk of the drunken shrew?  No—­not that!  My task is unlovely enough already, and I cannot inflict that last horror on those who will read this.  Thus much will I say—­if ever you know a man tied to a creature whose cheeks are livid purple in the morning and flushed at night, a creature who speaks thick at night and is ready with a villainous word for the most courteous and gentle of all whom she may meet, pray for that man.

The blue-blooded shrew is by no means uncommon.  Watch one of this kind yelling on a racecourse in tearful and foul-mouthed rage and you will have a few queer thoughts about human nature.  Then there is the ladylike shrew.  Ah, that being!  What has she to answer for?  She is neat, low-spoken, precise; she can purr like a cat, and she has the feline scratch always ready too.  Pity the governess, the servant, the poor flunkey whom she has at her mercy, for their bread is earned in bitterness.  “My lady” does not raise her voice; she can give orders for the perpetration of the meanest of deeds without varying the silken flow of her acrid tongue; but she is bad—­very bad; and I think that, if Dante and Swedenborg were at all near being true prophets, there would be a special quarter in regions dire for the lady-like shrew.