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THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MORNING AFTER.
Colonel Sprowle's family arose late the next morning. The fatigues and excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were followed by a natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading symptom. The sun shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle when the Colonel first found himself sufficiently awake to address his yet slumbering spouse.
"Sally!" said the Colonel, in a voice that was a little husky,—for he had finished off the evening with an extra glass or two of "Madary," and had a somewhat rusty and headachy sense of renewed existence, on greeting the rather advanced dawn,—"Sally!"
"Take care o' them custard-cups! There they go!"
Poor Mrs. Sprowle was fighting the party over in her dream; and as the visionary custard-cups crashed down through one lobe of her brain into another, she gave a start as if an inch of lightning from a quart Leyden jar had jumped into one of her knuckles with its sudden and lively poonk!
"Sally!" said the Colonel,—"wake up, wake up! What 'r' y' dreamin' abaout?"
Mrs. Sprowle raised herself, by a sort of spasm, sur son séant, as they say in France,—up on end, as we have it in New England. She looked first to the left, then to the right, then straight before her, apparently without seeing anything, and at last slowly settled down, with her two eyes, blank of any particular meaning, directed upon the Colonel.