Today's Stichomancy for Shaquille O'Neal

floor. Then quiet again.

None of us felt talkative. Bella had followed the men up and had been put out, and sat sniffling by herself in the den. Aunt Selina was working over a jig-saw puzzle in the library, and declaring that some of it must be lost. Anne and Leila Mercer were embroidering, and Betty and I sat idle, our hands in our laps. The whole atmosphere of the house was mysterious. Anne told over again of the strange noises the night her necklace was stolen. Betty asked me about the time when the comfort slipped from under my fingers. And when, in the midst of the story, the telephone rang, we all jumped and shrieked.

Bristol Channel, and The Channel--so called by way of eminence) that it cannot, or perhaps never will, be avoided but that several ships in the dark of the night and in stress of weather, may, by being out in their reckonings, or other unavoidable accidents, mistake; and if they do, they are sure, as the sailors call it, to run "bump ashore" upon Scilly, where they find no quarter among the breakers, but are beat to pieces without any possibility of escape.

One can hardly mention the Bishop and his Clerks, as they are called, or the rocks of Scilly, without letting fall a tear to the memory of Sir Cloudesley Shovel and all the gallant spirits that were with him, at one blow and without a moment's warning dashed

twenty years. This woman, heroic after her fashion, closed her daughter's eyes--those eyes that had wept so much--and kissed them. All the priests, followed by the choristers, surrounded the bed. By the flaming light of the torches they chanted the terrible /De Profundis/, the echoes of which told the population kneeling before the chateau, the friends praying in the salon, the servants in the adjoining rooms, that the mother of the canton was dead. The hymn was accompanied with moans and tears. The confession of that grand woman had not been audible beyond the threshold of the salon, and none but loving ears had heard it.

When the peasants of the neighborhood, joining with those of

neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening sidewalks, with little pools of rain, here and there, along their unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shop-windows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that one article; wet leaves of the, horse-chestnut or elm-trees, torn off untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly, accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washing,--these were the more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement and human life, there was the

House of Seven Gables