In spite of the attention I endeavored to bestow on the marvelous history of Black Hal and his grim companion, my mind occasionally wandered far away, and could only find repose in communing with her who I now discovered for the first time held in her own hands the thread of my destiny. Lucy was not blind to these fits of abstraction, and whenever they gained entire control of my attention, she would pause, lay down the manuscript, and threaten most seriously to discontinue the perusal, unless I proved a better listener. I ask no man's pardon for declaring that my sister was an excellent reader. Most brothers, perhaps think the same of most sisters; but there was a charm in Lucy's accent and a distinctness in her enunciation I have never heard excelled. Owing to these qualities, as much, perhaps, as to the strangeness of the story, I became interested in the fate of the drunken gambler, and when Lucy concluded, I was ready to exclaim, "And pray where is Black Hal now?"
My thoughts took another direction, however, and I impatiently demanded whether or not the sample story had been imitated. A guilty blush assured me quite as satisfactorily as words could have done, that Miss Lucy had herself made an attempt, and I therefore insisted that as she had whetted and excited the appetite, it would be highly unfraternal—(particularly in my present very precarious condition)—that parenthesis settled the matter—to deny me the means of satisfying it.
"But you'll laugh at me," timidly whispered my sister.
"Of course I shall," said I, "if your catastrophe is half as melancholy as Black Hal's. But make haste, or I shall be off to St. Louis. But pray inform me, what is the subject of your composition?"
"The Origin of Marriage."
"I believe, on my soul," responded I, laughing outright, "you girls never think about anything else."
I provoked no reply, and the manuscript being unfolded, my sister thus attempted to elucidate
THE ORIGIN OF MARRIAGE.
Professor Williams having ceased his manipulations, my eyes involuntarily closed, and I became unconscious to everything occurring around me. There's truth in mesmerism, after all, thought I, and being in the clairvoyant state, I beheld a most beautiful comet at this moment emerging from the constellation Taurus, and describing a curve about the star Zeta, one of the Pleiades. Now for a trip through infinite space! and as this thought entered my brain, I grasped a hair in the tail of the comet as it whizzed by me.