from the premises, and the gardener’s wife insisted that they had been purloined; Mrs. Tabitha, on the contrary, charged the losses upon the carelessness of the gardener’s family. It naturally happened, therefore, that this evening, upon hearing the steps of the two lovers repeatedly passing on the gravel walk beneath her window, the gardener’s wife should be on the alert. Here, no doubt, were the robbers. She dressed herself, slipped down stairs, unlocked the door, and leaving it open to secure her own retreat in case of need, but carrying the key with her to provide against the worse case of the enemy’s intercepting her, and throwing a detachment into the fortress, she placed herself in ambuscade amongst the bushes. No long time elapsed before two people were heard advancing: who they were the good woman could not make out from the deep shades of the shrubs, but she observed that they talked in low tones. The few words she caught were, “Sure that it is at the gardener’s;” “Easily take it away;” “Think it will be possible to raise the window without being heard?” Ay, thought the gardener’s wife, here are the robbers, and they are now planning a burglary. She watched them into her own house, silently crept after them, locked the door, and with the key in her pocket went off to alarm Mr. Mule’s family, to proclaim the capture of the robbers, and to rear a lasting monument to her own courage and innocence upon the basis of Mrs. Tabitha’s final confusion and mortification.
Ah, well-a-day, poor Mr. Mule, I see another storm brewing against your peace. Just sinking again into slumber, with his head under the bed-clothes, Mr. Mule was entering upon a region of milder dreams. Happelius was vanishing, basilisks were growing scarce, when all at once the ghost of the giant Thor appeared to him playing with his sledge-hammer upon his chamber-door. In direful confusion he awoke, and too surely he found there was something in it. The dream was so far wrong that it was not the door which was played upon but the window. Whether Thor were the performer could not yet be ascertained; but certainly the clatter, which now assailed the glass of Mr. Mule’s window, was quite worthy of Thor; and if not Thor, at least it might be said of the performer (according to the polite reply of the Frenchman to Dr. Moore in a different case), “Qu’il méritoit bien l’étre.” Mr. Mule kept his position under the bed-clothes, and determined to keep it, let what would happen. Frequent meditation upon the case of nocturnal panics had satisfied him that the best position which could be taken up in such circumstances was to cower under the bed-clothes—the worst ghost he had yet met with had not gone the length of pulling off his blankets. Besides, it was clearly the place of honour: in bad times, as Mr. Addison correctly observes, “the post of honour
