Spirit of the Sublime Respectable! thou dapper doorkeeper to all littleness, thou aider and fosterer of vanity, and selfishness, and hardness of heart--it is to be feared that since when you first put the (then infantine) soul of this woman into a corslet, with apparatus of tight-lacing, its growth has not been good. At first opening of the flood-gates, Sybilla’s tears were merely the outporings of disappointment; but the more she wept upstairs alone, the more she brooded and brooded, her sobs grew fewer, her tears hotter, and at length deliberately angry. She felt herself deceived--ill used; and her spirit chafed within her so willfully that even the loud, quick song of Godwin’s canary-bird wrought her to extreme irritation. Poor fellow! Had he been brought up like the light-colored canaries at home, surrounded by respectability and yellow gauze, he might have known himself (and Sybilla’s sorrows) better. As it was, however, he abandoned himself to his own emotions, and, thinking perhaps of the leafy old house in the northern suburbs, poured out his melodies like summer rain--faster and louder as Sybilla grew more irritated. He positively disobeyed her command to be still; the epithet “beast” he passed contemptuously over; she stamped her feet in vain. Hopping from perch to perch all the more readily and saucily as it had no tail worth mentioning, still the bird went on with liveliest rattle. At length, in a ferment of passion, Sybilla approached the cage, trembling steadily, as a spear thrown from the hand of a strong man trembles in the earth, seized the head of the guileless little songster, and it sang about the leafy old house no more. Godwin uttered no remark upon the discovery of this wickedness; but when he retired that evening, anger and grief contending within him--fire with flood--he placed his dead bird on a chair by the bedside, and lay all night with his face toward it. It was the last remaining of all the little meaningful gifts which, after the manner of lovers, Jessy had rendered him in exchange for others. One by one they had departed from him--got lost somehow--as if he were no more worthy of them; and there it lay--the last and most precious, for it had a real, vocal, interpretable language of some sort--dead enough, certainly: with nothing interpretable about it but its dumbness now. * * * * *