neglected in its supremest subtlety? Something of this argumentation was afterward echoed in her paper on Lionel Johnson: “Nothing was trivial to this ‘enamoured architect’ of perfection. He cultivated a half mischievous attachment to certain antique forms of spelling, and to the colon, which our slovenly press will have none of; and because the colon stands for fine differentiations and sly sequences, he delighted especially to employ it.” There were serious conclaves, in those years, when excerpts for the Pilgrim Scrip, a magazine of travel, were concerned, whether a man’s punctuation, being the reflex of his own individuality, should not be preserved in exactness. An English essayist of the nomad type, who was a very fiend of eccentricity, proved an undevoured bone of contention. His stops were enough to make the typographically judicious grieve. But had not he his own idea of the flow of his prose, and should not his punctuation be inviolate? Her own corrected proofs were a discipline to the uninitiate in scholarly ways, a despair, no doubt, to the indurated printer, and her ruthlessness toward her own work such as Roman and Spartan parents would have gasped at and found themselves too lax to emulate. Yet through these excesses of literary precision she went merrily. She was no Roundhead of the pen, taking her task in sadness. The ordinary proof reader, of set intentions and literal meanings, was her delight. In Songs at the Start is the line: “O the oar that was once so merry!” One of the battles she fought untiringly was over the vocative O, contending that it should never be followed by the intrusive comma. Yet the comma would sneak in, (“Abra was ready ere I called her name; And though I called another, Abra came!”) and in this case author and printer had fought it out, forward and back, unwearied play of rapier and bludgeon, until she wrote, properly enisled in the margin, after the careted O: “no comma.” And behold! the line appeared, in the final proof: “O no comma the oar that was once so merry!” And when, after another tussle with her mulish adversary, she thought she had him, the book itself fell open in her hand at his victorious finale: “O no, the oar that was once so merry!” The tale of her defeat was perennially delightful to her. She was never tired of telling it. Once, quoting the line: “Hoyden May threw her wild mantle on the hawthorn tree,”