We\'ve had a most awful time in our house. There have been ever so many robberies in town, and everybody has been almost afraid to go to bed.

The robbers broke into old Dr. Smith\'s house one night. Dr. Smith is one of those doctors that don\'t give any medicine except cold water, and he heard the robbers, and came down-stairs in his nigown, with a big umbrella in his hand, and said, "If you don\'t leave this minute, I\'ll shoot you." And the robbers they said, "Oh no! that umbrella isn\'t loaded" and they took him and tied his hands and feet, and put a mustard-plaster over his mouth, so that he couldn\'t yell, and then they filled the wash-tub with water, and made him sit down in it, and told him that now he\'d know how it was himself, and went away and left him, and he nearly froze to death before morning.

Father wasn\'t a bit afraid of the robbers, but he said he\'d fix something so that he would wake up if they got in the house. So he put a coal-scuttle full of coal about half-way up the stairs, and tied a string across the upper hall just at the head of the stairs. He said that if a robber[Pg 84] tried to come up-stairs he would upset the coal-scuttle, and make a tremendous noise, and that if he did happen not to upset it, he would certainly fall over the string at the top of the stairs. He told us that if we heard the coal-scuttle go off in the night, Sue and mother and I were to open the windows and scream, while he got up and shot the robber.

The first night, after father had fixed everything nicely for the robbers, he went to bed, and then mother told him that she had forgotten to lock the back door. So father he said, "Why can\'t women sometimes remember something," and he got up and started to go down-stairs in the dark. He forgot all about the string, and fell over it with an awful crash, and then began to fall down-stairs. When he got half-way down he met the coal-scuttle, and that went down the rest of the way with him, and you never in your life heard anything like the noise the two of them[Pg 85] made. We opened our windows, and cried murder and fire and thieves, and some men that were going by rushed in and picked father up, and would have taken him off to jail, he was that dreadfully black, if I hadn\'t told them who he was.

But this was not the awful time that I mentioned when I began to write, and if I don\'t begin to tell you about it, I sha\'n\'t have any room left on my paper. Mother gave a dinner-party last Thursday. There were ten ladies and[Pg 86] twelve gentlemen, and one of them was that dreadful Mr. Martin with the cork leg, and other improvements, as Mr. Travers calls them. Mother told me not to let her see me ............