And now I must tell you my own little news. Beelzebub has taken a worse devil to himself, so that I am likely to be trodden down into the very middle of the pit. I choose to tell you because I won't have you think that I have ever kept anything secret from you. If I describe the roars of Mrs. Beelzebub to you, and her red claws, and her forky tongue, and her fiery tail, it is not because I like her as a subject of poetry, but because this special subject comes uppermost; and you shall never say to me, why didn't you tell me when you were introduced to Beelzebub's wife? and assert, as men are apt to do, that you would not have allowed me to make her acquaintance. Mrs. Beelzebub appears on the stage as belonging to Mahomet but how they have mixed it all up together among themselves, I do not quite know. I do not think that they're in love with one another, because she is not jealous of me. She is Madame Socani in the plot, and a genuine American from New York; but she can sing; she has a delicious soprano voice, soft and powerful; but she has also a temper and temperament such as no woman, nor yet no devil, ought to possess. Of Monsieur Socani, or Signor Socani, or Herr Socani, I never yet heard. But such men do not always make themselves troublesome. I have to sing with her, and a woman you may say would not be troublesome, but she and Mahomet between them consider themselves competent to get me under their thumb. I don't intend to be under their thumb. I intend to be under nobody's thumb but yours; and the sooner the better. Now you know all about it; but as you shall value the first squeeze which you shall get when you do come, don't come till your coming has been properly settled. Then there was a fourth letter in which she described her troubles, still humorously, and with some attempt at absolute comedy. But she certainly wrote with a purpose of making him understand that she was subjected to very considerable annoyance. She was still determined not to call upon him for assistance; and she warned him that any assistance whatever would be out of his power. A lover on the scene, who could not declare his purpose of speedy marriage, would be worse than useless. All that she saw plainly,--or at any rate declared that she saw plainly, though she was altogether unable to explain it to Frank Jones.