Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/100

70 NOTICE!

My wife Sophia Pickles having left my bed and board without just cause or provocation, I shall not be responsible for bills of her contracting.

NOTICE!

I take this means of saying that Solomon Pickles has had no bed or board for me to leave for the last two months.

Another story which they repeated, liking its portentous inference lacking fact, was this; the Nurse speaks first.

"Nurse," says he, kind of high and haughty-like, "what is your opinion?"

"Doctor," says I, kind of low and deferential-like, "I am of your opinion."

"And what was his opinion?" asked the listener.

"Lord bless you, my dear, he hadn't any!"

Her brother's children never forgot the Sunday when he repeated at the dinner table a few of the hymns of his upbringing, their teeth chattering at his rendition of "My thoughts on awful subjects roll— Damnation and the Dead!"

Emily had about this time quite a spicy affair with a young law student in her father's office, an habitué of the house who was bewitched with her and certainly added quite an amount of variety, if only as another objective for her own mental sallies. He became a confirmed bachelor, but she assailed him with a valentine unique in that Saint's calendar, and he brought her many books, among which were the first copies of the Brontë girls' strange stories, from "Jane Eyre" to "Wuthering Heights" and the "Tenant of Wildfell Hall."