MANUSCRIPT: AC. Ink. Dated: Amherst New Year 11^th/50.

PUBLICATION: L (1931) 57-61.

White and Leavitt were the business partners of Norcross. The character or Mrs. Caudle, a voluble scold, was created by Douglas William Jerrold for Punch, and Mrs. Caude's Curtain Lectures was published in 1846. Mrs. Partington, a village Malaprop, was a character created by Benjamin P. Shillaber for a Boston newspaper in 1847. The first quotation in the second paragraph recalls Paradise Lost, II, 51: "My sentence is for open war"; the second quotation in the same paragraph, the conclusion of Bryant's Thanatopsis: "Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch/ About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."