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of this heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of. And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious fabric by the housemaid's broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the Doctor's celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life,—that of reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them."

Note 2. Author's note.—"Ned must learn something of the characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion."