midnight
Her sleeves had a fashionable cut , and half a dozen metal bangles rattled on her wrists . Her voice rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a stream of anecdote and ejaculation ; and her round black eyes jumped with acrobatic velocity from one face to another . Miss Mellins was always having or hearing of amazing adventures . She had surprised a burglar in her room at midnight -LRB- though how he got there , what he robbed her of , and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her auditors -RRB- ; she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer -LRB- a rejected suitor -RRB- was putting poison in her tea ; she had a customer who was shadowed by detectives , and another -LRB- a very wealthy lady -RRB- who had been arrested in a department store for kleptomania ; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his mother-in-law ; she had escaped from two fires in her night-gown , and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin , precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted family . A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins 's proneness to adventure by the fact that she derived her chief mental nourishment from the Police Gazette and the Fireside Weekly ; but her lot was cast in a circle where such insinuations were not likely to be heard , and where the title-role in blood-curdling drama had long been her recognized right . `` Yes , '' she was now saying , her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza , `` you may not believe it , Miss Bunner , and I do n't know 's I should myself if anybody else was to tell me , but over a year before ever I was born , my mother she went to see a gypsy fortune-teller that was exhibited in a tent on the Battery with the green-headed lady , though her father warned her not to -- and what you s ` pose she told her ? Why , she told her these very words -- says she : ` Your next child 'll be a girl with jet-black curls , and she 'll suffer from spasms . ' ''