Mr. Walsey, of The Spy, who had formerly conducted a paper in a college town and was not accustomed to the feminine possibilities of manufacturing localities, felt almost afraid of her.  He had never seen a woman of that sort, and thought vaguely of the French Revolution and fish-wives when she gave vent to her distress over the loss of the child.  He fairly jumped when she cut short a question of his with a volley of self-recriminatory truths, accompanied with fierce gesturing.  He stood back involuntarily out of reach of those powerful, waving arms.  “Do I know of any reason for the child to run away?” shrieked Eva, in a voice shrilly hideous with emotion, now and then breaking into hoarseness with the strain of tears.  “I guess I know why, I guess I do, and I wish I had been six foot under ground before I did what I did.  It was all my fault, every bit of it.  When I got home, and found that Fan had been making that precious young one a dress out of my old blue one, I pitched into her for it, and she gave it back to me, and then we jawed, and kept it up, till Andrew, he grabbed the dress and flung it into the fire, and did just right, too, and took Ellen and run over to old lady Brewster’s with her; then Ellen, she see him cryin’, and it scared her ’most to death, poor little thing, and she heard him say that if it wasn’t for her he’d quit, and then she come runnin’ home to her mother and me, and her mother said the same thing, and then that poor young one, she thought she wa’n’t wanted nowheres, and she run.  She always was as easy to hurt as a baby robin; it didn’t take nothing to set her all of a flutter and a twitter; and now she’s just flown out of the nest.  Oh my God, I wish my tongue had been torn out by the roots before I’d said a word about her blessed little dress; I wish Fan had cut up every old rag I’ve got; I’d go dressed in fig-leaves before I’d had it happen.  Oh! oh! oh!”

Young Joe Bemis, of The Star, was the first to leave, whirling madly and precariously down the street on his wheel, which was dizzily tall in those days.  Mrs. Zelotes, hailing him from her open window, might as well have hailed the wind.  Her family dissensions were well aired in The Star next morning, and she always kept the cutting at the bottom of a little rosewood work-box where she stored away divers small treasures, and never looked at the box without a swift dart of pain as from a hidden sting and the consciousness as of the presence of some noxious insect caged therein.

Mrs. Zelotes was more successful in arresting the progress of the other editors, and (standing at the window, her Bible on the little table at her side) flatly contradicted all that had been told them by her daughter-in-law and her sister.  “The Louds always give way, no matter what comes up.  You can always tell what kind of a family anybody comes from by the way they take things when anything comes across them.  You can’t depend on anything she says this morning.  My son did not