The very day Mr. Smith sailed in the steamer for Charleston, I sent for an upholsterer, and after explaining to him the defect connected with my sofa, directed him to have the seating all removed, and then replaced by new materials, taking particular care to thoroughly cleanse the inside of the wood work, lest the vestige of a moth should be left remaining. All this was done, at a cost of twenty dollars. When Mr. Smith returned, the sofa was back in its place; and he was none the wiser for the change, until some months afterwards, when, unable to keep the secret any longer, I told him the whole story. I am pretty well cured, I think now, of bargain-buying. CHAPTER XXII. A PEEVISH DAY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. THERE are few housekeepers who have not had their sick and peevish days. I have had mine, as the reader will see by the following story, which I some time since ventured to relate, in the third person, and which I now take the liberty of introducing into these confessions. "It is too bad, Rachel, to put me to all this trouble; and you know I can hardly hold up my head." Thus spoke Mrs. Smith, in a peevish voice, to a quiet looking domestic, who had been called up from the kitchen to supply some unimportant omission in the breakfast table arrangement. Rachel looked hurt and rebuked, but made no reply. "How could you speak in that way to Rachel?" said Mr. Smith, as soon as the domestic had withdrawn. "If you felt just as I do, Mr. Smith, you would speak cross, too!" Mrs. Smith replied a little warmly--"I feel just like a rag; and my head aches as if it would burst." "I know you feel badly, and I am very sorry for you. But still, I suppose it is as easy to speak kindly as harshly. Rachel is very obliging and attentive, and should be borne with in occasional omissions, which you of course know are not wilful." "It is easy enough to preach," retorted Mrs. Smith, whose temper, from bodily lassitude and pain, was in quite an irritable state. The reader will understand at least one of the reasons of this, when he is told that the scene here presented occurred during the last oppressive week in August. Mr. Smith said no more. He saw that to do so would only be to provoke instead of quieting his wife's ill humor. The morning meal went by in silence, but little food passing the lips of either. How could it, when the thermometer was ninety-four at eight o'clock in the morning, and the leaves upon the trees were as motionless as if suspended in a vacuum. Bodies and minds were relaxed--and the one turned from food, as the other did from thought, with an instinctive aversion.