"Have you ever read that book, sir? It is dedicated, I think, to Charles the Second, and it begins with Fifteen Propositions, and she read every one of them Propositions from first to last. Then she turned to the section, sir, about Salutations and Recreations, and she read and read and read until, sir, actually it made my head swim.
"Do you know, sir, is Barclay still alive—the man who wrote that book? Is there no way of getting even with him?
"I couldn't get away. I might have walked out somehow with the chair fastened to me; but I couldn't go, could I, sir, with the table tied to my leg, and particularly if I had to climb the fence? So I had to set there and be regarded as a burglar.
"But at last I would be heard, and I told her I was no burglar but an innercent man; and then she looked in the index to find if Barclay had anything interesting to say about the wickedness of telling falsehoods. And then I said I was a member of the Baptist Society, and she said at once she would read Barclay on the errors of that sect; but I insisted on being heard, and I explained to her that I got into this trouble by trying to cure William Jones by frictional electricity, and she said: 'Thee has an ingenious and fruitful mind to invent such a story. Oh, that it had been turned to better devices than following a life of evil!'
"'And it seems hard, too,' I said, 'that a perfectly respectable Baptist plumber should be arrested as a burglar simply because he tried to relieve the pain of William Jones by a scientific method invented by the Huxley Institute.'
"Where is thy friend William Jones?' she asked.
"Do you know, sir, at that very moment you could hear through the partition William Jones and Bella Dougherty laughing next door! It seemed like mockery to me, a-setting there in chains, so to speak.
"'He is next door, ma'am,' I said, 'a-courting the hired girl.'
"'I will prove if thee is telling the truth,' she said, and she got up and moved toward the door.
"'No, ma'am, no!' I said; 'please don't do that! William mustn't know that I am here'; and so she comes back and sets down again, and picks up Barclay, and looks sorrerful at me, and says: