At this merciless exposure of the most hidden secret of her breast, scarcely breathed even to herself, Mrs. Prymmer collapsed. In her progress around the table she had reached the point she started from. Here the upper part of her body subsided in a heap on the table, and she burst into a flood of tears. "Good girl," said Captain White, patting the back of her head. "I've been wanting to see you do this for many a day. There's nothing so improving as to get down in the gutter with the rest of mankind. You've been too stuck on your own virtues, Hippolyta." She continued to weep, and finally, to sob bitterly, and he changed the tone of his advice. "Hush up, now, hush up. You can't help your thoughts running ahead to old Deacon Turner's widowship. His wife has got to die. All the doctors say so, and the woman hasn't got sprawl enough to live after that. And you needn't bother with the old deacon. Here's a ready-made bachelor just to hand. It knocks me silly to think, with your nuptial inclinations, you've never singled me out. You never thought of me, because I was your cousin. But it's quite fashionable to marry your cousin, especially in English ports. Hush up, now, Hippy, hush up, I've got something to tell you." Mrs. Prymmer would not hush up. No one had ever talked to her like this. He had shattered the very foundations of her self-righteousness, and had reduced her to the lowest depths of humility. She felt as if she could never lift her head again. "Well, then, go on," he said, agreeably, "but keep one ear open for what I'm going to say. I've got my weather eye open in the Turner direction, and I'm not going to let that old man dash in ahead of me. And you're so everlasting quick in your matrimonial didoes that I've got to catch opportunity's forelock. Twice you've got ahead of me and made me mad, though I didn't blame you so much for jumping at Sylvester Mercer, for you were young and giddy. But you showed a most ugly haste in flirting your widow's veil at old Zebedee Prymmer. Bad luck to him, he encouraged you-- Don't stick out your hand; I'll run him down all I like,--a low, base cotton-seed imitation of genuine olive oil, singing in his silky voice about 'mansions in the skies,' and then coming out of prayer-meeting to cheat his neighbours like a house afire. Folks say to speak no evil of the dead. I say, give it to 'em. Hold 'em up and rake and rattle 'em. They're where you can't harm 'em, and you may benefit the living. Spare the living, I say, but rap the dead over the knuckles if they have deserved it. Hippolyta, will you be my little monument?" Her portly frame trembled, and she turned her swollen, comely face toward him, in dazed inquiry.