“Oh, Doodle! Doodle! If you was alive, I shouldn’t be in this predickerment.” If I had some hen’s feathers by me, I should have burnt a few, to keep me from given up, and fainting away. And then these words came to me: “Oh, Doodle! Doodle! You never would have stood by, and seen your relict smashed to pieces before your linement.” And as I heerd these words, I seen her appearin’ to me. I see the Widder Doodle emergin’ from the crushin’ crowd, and advancin’ onto me like a phantom. Says I, in a low voice, “Be you a ghost, or be you a phantom? or are you a forerunner, Widder?” Says I, “You be a forerunner, I know you be.” For even as I looked, I see behind her the form of Solomon Cypher, advancin’ slowly, and appearin’ to me. I felt strange, and feerfully curious. But within ½ to ⅔ of a moment, my senses came back, for on givin’ her a closer look, I see that no respectable ghost, that thought anything of itself, would be ketched out in company, a-lookin’ so like fungation. I felt better, and says I: “Widder Doodle, how under the sun did you come here to Dover town?” Says she, “Samantha, I am married; I am on my tower.” I thought again, almost wildly, of burnt feathers, but I controlled myself, pretty well, and says: “Who to?” “Solemen Cypher,” says she. “We are goin’ to his brother’s on our tower.” As she said this, it all came back to me—Solemen’s talk the day he came to borry my cloze for the mourners: her visits to his housekeeper sense; and his strange and foolish errents to our house from day to day. Why, he had made such strange and mysterious errents to our house since his wife died, that I had told Josiah “I believed Solemen Cypher wus a-loosin’ his faculties,” and I shouldn’t have been a mite surprised to have had him beset us to lend him a meetin’ house, or try to get the loan of an Egyptian mummy. Now I see through them strange and mysterious errents of his’n. But I didn’t speak my thoughts; I only said, almost mechanically: “Widder Doodle, what under the sun hus put it into your head to marry?” “Wall,” she said, she “had kinder got into the habit of marryin’, and it seemed some like 2nd nater to her, and she thought Solemen had some of Mr. Doodle’s liniment, and she thought she’d kinder marry to him, and——” She tried to excuse it off, but she didn’t give any firm reason that carried conviction to my soul. But I says to myself, in reasonable axents: “Samantha, can you—can you ever obtain anything to carry from an ort?” I see, on lookin’ closer at her, what made her look so oncommon curius. She had tried to dress sort o’ bridy, and at the same time was a-mournin’ for Doodle. (She never will get that man out of her head, I don’t believe.) She said she “didn’t want to hurt Solemen’s feelin’s. She put on the white bobbinet lace to please Cypher. But,” says she, “though Solemen don’t mistrust it, my black bead collar and jest half of my weddin’ dress means Doodle.”