—­Oh, but when you once do know her!  I don’t believe I could write stories all the time as I do, if she didn’t ask me up to her chamber, and let me read them to her.  Do you know, I can make her laugh and cry, reading my poor stories?  And sometimes, when I feel as if I had written out all there is in me, and want to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up except in a world where there are no weekly papers,—­when everything goes wrong, like a car off the track,—­she takes hold and sets me on the rails again all right.

—­How does she go to work to help you?

—­Why, she listens to my stories, to begin with, as if she really liked to hear them.  And then you know I am dreadfully troubled now and then with some of my characters, and can’t think how to get rid of them.  And she’ll say, perhaps, Don’t shoot your villain this time, you’ve shot three or four already in the last six weeks; let his mare stumble and throw him and break his neck.  Or she’ll give me a hint about some new way for my lover to make a declaration.  She must have had a good many offers, it’s my belief, for she has told me a dozen different ways for me to use in my stories.  And whenever I read a story to her, she always laughs and cries in the right places; and that’s such a comfort, for there are some people that think everything pitiable is so funny, and will burst out laughing when poor Rip Van Winkle—­you’ve seen Mr. Jefferson, haven’t you?—­is breaking your heart for you if you have one.  Sometimes she takes a poem I have written and reads it to me so beautifully, that I fall in love with it, and sometimes she sets my verses to music and sings them to me.

—­You have a laugh together sometimes, do you?

—­Indeed we do.  I write for what they call the “Comic Department” of the paper now and then.  If I did not get so tired of story-telling, I suppose I should be gayer than I am; but as it is, we two get a little fun out of my comic pieces.  I begin them half-crying sometimes, but after they are done they amuse me.  I don’t suppose my comic pieces are very laughable; at any rate the man who makes a business of writing me down says the last one I wrote is very melancholy reading, and that if it was only a little better perhaps some bereaved person might pick out a line or two that would do to put on a gravestone.

—­Well, that is hard, I must confess.  Do let me see those lines which excite such sad emotions.

—­Will you read them very good-naturedly?  If you will, I will get the paper that has “Aunt Tabitha.”  That is the one the fault-finder said produced such deep depression of feeling.  It was written for the “Comic Department.”  Perhaps it will make you cry, but it was n’t meant to.

—­I will finish my report this time with our Scheherezade’s poem, hoping that—­any critic who deals with it will treat it with the courtesy due to all a young lady’s literary efforts.

Aunt Tabitha.