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Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio. Second Series

by Fanny Fern · English · Gutenberg #45450 · 520,921 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio. Second Series

Author: Fanny Fern

Illustrator: Frederick M. Coffin


        
Release date: April 21, 2014 [eBook #45450]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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Transcriber’s Note:


  In this utf-8 text version of Fern Leaves:
     words in italics are marked with _underscores_
     words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE
     a row of asterisks represents a thought break.
  Other notes follow the text.




[Illustration: THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE.]




[Illustration: FERN LEAVES FROM FANNY’S PORTFOLIO

SECOND SERIES

AUBURN & BUFFALO: Miller, Orton & Mulligan.]




  EIGHTEENTH THOUSAND.

  Fern Leaves
  FROM
  FANNY’S PORT-FOLIO.

  SECOND SERIES.

  With Original Designs by Fred. M. Coffin.

  AUBURN AND BUFFALO:
  MILLER, ORTON & MULLIGAN.

  LONDON:
  SAMPSON LOW, SON & CO.,
  1854.
  Published first in England by International Arrangement with the
    American Proprietors, and entered at Stationers’ Hall.

  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
    hundred and fifty-three,
  BY MILLER, ORTON & MULLIGAN.
  In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Northern District
    of New York.


  AUBURN:

  MILLER, ORTON & MULLIGAN

  STEREOTYPERS AND PRINTERS.


  TO

  MY TRUEST FRIEND,

  OLIVER DYER,

  WHOSE FRIENDSHIP NEVER FALTERED, IN ADVERSITY;

  WHOSE SYMPATHY AND ENCOURAGEMENT CHEERED ME,

  WHEN NO BOW OF PROMISE WAS SET IN MY SKY;

  This Book is Gratefully Dedicated,

  BY

  THE AUTHOR.




PREFACE.


TO MY READERS:

  Six months since, I was in a deplorable state of ignorance as to the
most felicitous style of Preface; at this lapse of time, I find myself
not a whit the wiser. You will permit me, therefore, in pressing again
your friendly hands, simply to say, that I hope my second offering of
“Fern Leaves” will be more worthy of your acceptance, than the first.

                                                       FANNY FERN.




CONTENTS.


                                                          PAGE.

  Shadows and Sunbeams,                                     13
  Aunt Hepsy,                                               36
  Thoughts at Church,                                       40
  The Brothers,                                             42
  Curious Things,                                           48
  The advantages of a House in a Fashionable Square,        49
  Winter is Coming,                                         59
  The Other Sex,                                            61
  Soliloquy of Mr. Broadbrim,                               63
  Willie Grey,                                              65
  Tabitha Tompkins’ Soliloquy,                              82
  Soliloquy of a Housemaid,                                 85
  Critics,                                                  87
  Forgetful Husbands,                                       89
  Summer Friends,                                           91
  How the Wires are Pulled,                                 92
  Who would be the Last Man,                                95
  Only a Cousin,                                            96
  The Calm of Death,                                        99
  Mrs. Adolphus Smith sporting the Blue Stocking,          101
  Cecile Vray,                                             103
  Sam Smith’s Soliloquy,                                   105
  Love and Duty,                                           110
  A False Proverb,                                         114
  A Model Husband,                                         116
  How is it?                                               118
  A Morning Ramble,                                        120
  Hour-Glass Thoughts,                                     123
  Boarding-House Experiences,                              125
  A Grumble from the (H)altar,                             132
  A Wicked Paragraph,                                      133
  Mistaken Philanthrophy,                                  135
  Insignificant Love,                                      137
  A Model Married Man,                                     139
  Meditations of Paul Pry, jun.,                           141
  Sunshine and Young Mothers,                              144
  Uncle Ben’s attack of Spring Fever, and how Cured,       146
  The Aged Minister Voted a Dismission,                    150
  The Fatal Marriage,                                      152
  Frances Sargeant Osgood,                                 157
  Best Things,                                             161
  The Vestry Meeting,                                      164
  A Broadway Shop Reverie,                                 167
  The Old Woman,                                           170
  Sunday Morning at the Dibdins,                           172
  Items of Travel,                                         175
  Newspaper-dom,                                           178
  Have we any Men among us?                                181
  How to Cure the Blues,                                   183
  Rain in the City,                                        185
  Mrs. Weasel’s Husband,                                   187
  Country Sunday _vs._ City Sunday,                        189
  Sober Husbands,                                          192
  Our Street,                                              194
  When you are Angry,                                      199
  Little Bessie,                                           201
  The Delights of Visiting,                                205
  Helen Haven’s Happy New Year,                            207
  Dollars and Dimes,                                       212
  Our Nelly,                                               214
  Study Men, not Books,                                    218
  Murder of the Innocents,                                 220
  American Ladies,                                         224
  The Stray Sheep,                                         226
  The Fashionable Preacher,                                230
  Cash,                                                    233
  Only a Child,                                            235
  Mrs. Pipkin’s idea of Family Retrenchment,               237
  A Chapter for Nice Old Farmers,                          239
  Madam Rouillon’s Mourning Saloon,                        241
  Fashion in Funerals,                                     243
  Household Tyrants,                                       245
  Women and Money,                                         247
  The Sick Bachelor,                                       249
  A Mother’s Influence,                                    252
  Mr. Punch Mistaken,                                      257
  Fern Musings,                                            259
  The Time to Choose,                                      261
  Spring is Coming,                                        262
  Steamboat Sights and Reflections,                        265
  A Gotham Reverie,                                        268
  Sickness in the City and Country,                        269
  Hungry Husbands,                                         273
  Light and Shadow,                                        275
  A Matrimonial Reverie,                                   278
  What Love will Accomplish,                               279
  Mrs. Grumble’s Soliloquy,                                283
  Henry Ward Beecher,                                      285
  An Old maid’s Decision,                                  289
  A Punch at Punch,                                        291
  Father Taylor, the Sailor’s Preacher,                    292
  Signs of the Times,                                      296
  Whom does it concern,                                    300
  Who Loves a Rainy Day,                                   306
  A Conscientious Young Man,                               310
  City Scenes and City Life, No. 1,                        312
      do             do      do  2,                        317
      do             do      do  3,                        322
      do             do      do  4,                        326
  Two Pictures,                                            330
  Feminine Waiters at Hotels,                              332
  Letter to the Empress Eugenia,                           334
  Music in the Natural Way,                                337
  For Ladies that go Shopping,                             339
  Modern Improvements,                                     344
  The Old Merchant wants a Situation,                      348
  A Moving Tale,                                           350
  This Side and That,                                      358
  Mrs. Zebedee Smith’s Philosophy,                         361
  Opening of the Crystal Palace,                           363
  A Lance Couched for the Children,                        369
  A Chapter on Housekeeping,                               371
  Barnum’s Museum,                                         373
  A Fern Reverie,                                          377
  Apollo Hyacinth,                                         381
  Spoiled Little Boy,                                      384
  A Brown Study,                                           386
  Incidents at the Five Points House of Industry,          388
  Nancy Pry’s Soliloquy,                                   396
  For Little Children,                                     397




Illustrations.


                                                   PAGE.
  VIGNETTE TITLE,
  THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE, (FRONTISPIECE.)
  MR. STUBBS AND HIS FRIENDS,                        82
  THE BLUE STOCKING,                                101
  THE AGED MINISTER,                                150
  OUR STREET,                                       194
  SIMON SKINFLINT,                                  300
  THE MAY-DAY MOVING,                               350




Fern Leaves--Second Series.




SHADOWS AND SUNBEAMS.


CHAPTER I.

  I can see it now: the little brown house, with its sloping roof,
its clumsy old chimneys, and its vine-clad porch; where the brown bee
hummed his drowsy song, and my silver-haired old father sat dozing the
sultry summer noons away, with shaggy Bruno at his feet. The bright
earth had no blight or mildew then for me. The song of the little
birds, resting beneath the eaves, filled my heart with a quiet joy. It
was sweet, when toil was over, to sit in the low door-way, and watch
the golden sun go down, and see the many-tinted clouds fade softly
away (like a dying saint) into the light of heaven, and evening’s
glittering star glow, like a seraph’s eye, above them. ’Twas sweet,
when Autumn touched the hill-side foliage with rainbow dyes, to see the
gorgeous leaves come circling down on the soft Indian-summer breeze.
’Twas sweet, when the tripping, silver stream lay still and cold in
Winter’s icy clasp, and the flowers fainted beneath his chilly breath,
and the leafless trees stretched out their imploring arms, and shook
off, impatiently, their snowy burthen, and the heavy wagon-wheels went
creaking past, and the ruddy farmer struck his brawny arms across his
ample chest, for warmth, and goaded the lazy, round-eyed oxen up the
icy hill. Even then, it was sunshine still, in the little brown house:
in the ample chimney glowed and crackled the blazing faggots; rows of
shining pans glittered upon the shelves; the fragrant loaf steamed
in the little oven; the friendly tea-kettle, smoking, sang in the
chimney corner, and by its side still sat the dear old father, with the
faithful newspaper, that weekly brought us news from the busy world,
from which our giant forest-trees had shut us out.

  Ah! those were happy days: few wants and no cares: the patriarch’s
head was white with grave blossoms, yet his heart was fresh and green.
Alas! that, under the lowliest door-way, as through the loftiest
portal, the Guest unbidden cometh. The morning sun rose fair, but it
shone upon silver locks that stirred with no breath of life, upon
loving lips forever mute, upon a palsied, kindly hand that gave no
returning pressure. Soon, over the heart so warm and true, the snow lay
white and cold; the winter wind sang its mournful requiem, and from
out the little brown house, the orphan passed with tearful gaze and
lingering footstep.


CHAPTER II.

  Oh, the bitter, bitter bread of dependence! No welcome by the
hearth-stone: no welcome at the board: the mocking tone, the cutting
taunt, the grudged morsel. Weary days, and sleepless, memory-torturing
nights.

  “Well, Josiah’s dead and gone,” said my uncle, taking down his
spectacles from the mantel, to survey me, as I sank on the settle,
in the chimney corner. “Take off your bonnet, Hetty. I suppose we
must give you house-room. Josiah never had the knack of saving
anything--more’s the pity for _you_. That farm of his was awfully
mismanaged. I could have had twice the produce he did off that land.
Sheer nonsense, that shallow ploughing of his, tiring the land all
out; he should have used the sub-soil plough. Then he had no idea of
the proper rotation of crops, or how to house his cattle in winter,
or to keep his tools where they wouldn’t rust and rot. That new barn,
too, was a useless extravagance. He might have roofed the old one.
It’s astonishing what a difference there is in brothers, about getting
beforehand in the world. Now I’ve a cool thousand in the bank, all for
taking care of little things. (There, Jonathan! Jonathan! you’ve taken
the meal out of the wrong barrel: it was the damaged meal I told you to
carry to Widow Folger.)

  “Well, as I was saying, Hetty, in the first place, your father didn’t
know how to manage; then he didn’t know how to say No. He’d lend money
to anybody who wanted it, and pay his workmen just what they took it
into their heads it was right to ask. Now, there’s Jonathan, yonder; a
day or two since, he struck for higher wages. Well, I _let_ him strike,
and got an Irishman in his place. This morning he came whining back,
saying that his wife was sick, and his youngest child lay dead in the
house, and that he was willing to work on at the old wages. That’s the
way to do, Hetty. If Jonathan chose to saddle himself with a wife and
babies, before he was able to feed them, I don’t see the justice of my
paying for it. But it’s time for family prayers: that will be something
new to you, I suppose. I don’t want to judge _any_ body: I hope your
father has gone to Heaven, but I’m afraid he didn’t let his light
shine. Don’t whimper, child; as the tree falls so it must lie. You must
see that you do _your_ duty: make yourself useful here in my house, and
try to pay your way. Young people of your age consume a great deal in
the way of food and clothes.”

  Oh, the monotony of those weary days! how memory lingered over the
sunny past: how thought shrank back affrighted from the gloomy future:
how untiringly and thanklessly I strove to cancel the debt for daily
bread, and how despairingly I prayed for relief from such bitter
thraldom.


CHAPTER III.

  “Make up the bed in the north room, Hetty,” said my aunt; “it’s
our turn to board the schoolmaster this week. You needn’t put on the
best sheets: these book-learning folks are always wool-gathering. He
never’ll know the difference. What a hungry set these schoolmasters
are, to be sure: it keeps a body all the time cooking. A bushel of
doughnuts is a mere circumstance. When the last master was here, our
winter barrel of cider went off like snow in April. I hope Jonathan
learned enough at school to pay for it, but I have my doubts: he trips
in the multiplication table yet. Your uncle and I think that this
boarding schoolmasters is a poor business--a losing bargain. He says
I must put less on the table, but it is no use to try that game with
George Grey. He’s as independent as Adam in Eden, before the serpent
and his wife got in. He’d just as lief call for anything he wanted as
not, and somehow or other, when he does, I always feel as if I had no
choice about bringing it. That eye of his always makes me think of
forked lightning; and yet he’s kindly spoken, too. He is as much of a
riddle to unravel, as one of Parson Jones’ doctrinal sermons. But, go
make his bed, Hetty, and mind you stuff a few rags in that broken pane
of glass over it. I spoke to your uncle about getting it mended, but he
said warm weather would be along in three months, and that’s very true,
Hetty. Hist! your uncle is calling you. He says he is going out in the
barn to thresh, and if Peter Tay comes up the road, and stops in here
again, for him to subscribe towards the minister’s new cloak, you must
say that he has gone to Jifftown, and will not be home for a week at
least. Now don’t forget, Hetty: people seem to think one earns money
now-a-days on purpose to give away. A new cloak! humph! I wonder if the
Apostle Paul’s hearers ever gave him a new cloak? I wonder if John the
Baptist ever had a donation party? Don’t the minister have his salary,
two hundred dollars a year--part in produce, part in money; paid
regularly, when the times ain’t too hard? Go make the school-master’s
bed now, Hetty. One pillow will do for him. Goodness knows he carries
his head high enough when he is awake. I shouldn’t wonder if he had
been captain or colonel, or something, some muster day.”

  The schoolmaster! Should I be permitted to go to school? or should I
be kept drudging at home? Would this Mr. Grey think me very ignorant?
I began to feel as if his forked-lightning eyes were already on me.
My cheeks grew hot at the idea of making a blunder in his awful
presence. What a miserable room my aunt had provided for him! If I
could but put up some nice white curtains at the window, or get him a
cushioned chair, or put in a bureau, or chest of drawers. It looked
so comfortless--so different from the welcome my dear old father
was wont to give to “the stranger within the gates;” and now memory
pictured him, as he sat in the old arm chair, and I knelt again at the
low foot-stool at his feet, and his hand strayed caressingly over my
temples, and I listened to old continental stories, till the candle
burned low in the socket, and only the fire-light flickered dimly on
the old portrait of General Washington, and on my father’s time-worn
face.

  My aunt’s shrill voice soon roused me from my reverie. Dinner time
had come, and with it Mr. Grey--a gentlemanly young man, of about
two and twenty, with a bright, keen, blue eye, and a frank, decided,
off-hand manner, that seemed to me admirably in keeping with his erect,
imposing figure and firm step. Even my uncle reefed in a sail or two in
his presence, and my aunt involuntarily qualified her usual bluntness
of manner. I uttered a heartfelt thanksgiving when dinner was over.


CHAPTER IV.

  “Hetty,” said my uncle, as the door closed upon Mr. Grey. “I suppose
you must go to school, or the neighbors will say we don’t treat you
well. You ought to be very thankful for such a home as this, Hetty;
women are poor miserable creatures, left without money. I wish it had
pleased Providence to have made you a boy. You might then have done
Jonathan’s work just as well as not, and saved me his wages and board.
There’s a piece of stone wall waiting to be laid, and the barn wants
shingling. Josiah now would be at the extravagance of hiring a mason
and a carpenter to do it.

  “Crying? I wonder what’s the matter now? Well, it’s beyond me to keep
track of anything in the shape of a woman. One moment they are up in
the attic of ecstasy; the next, down in the cellar of despondency, as
the Almanac says; and it is as true as if it had been written in the
Apocrypha. I only said that it is a thousand pities that you were not
a boy; then you could graft my trees for me, and hoe, and dig, and
plant, and plough, and all that sort of thing. This puttering round,
washing dishes a little, and mopping floors a little, and wringing out
a few clothes, don’t amount to much toward supporting yourself. Let
me see, you have had, since you came here”--and my uncle put on his
spectacles, and pulled out a well-thumbed pocket memorandum--“You’ve
had t-w-o p-a-i-r-s of shoes, at t-h-r-e-e s-h-i-l-l-i-n-g-s a pair,
and nine yards of calico, for a dress, at s-i-x c-e-n-t-s a yard. That
’mounts up, Hetty, ’mounts up. You see it costs something to keep you.
I earned _my_ money, and if you ever expect to have any, you must earn
yours”--and my uncle took out his snuff-box, helped himself to a pinch,
and, with the timely aid of a stray sunbeam, achieved a succession of
very satisfactory sneezes.

  The following day, under the overwhelming consciousness of my
feminity and consequent good-for-nothingness, I made my debut at Master
Grey’s school.

  It was a huge barn of a room, ill lighted, ill warmed, and worse
ventilated, crowded with pupils of both sexes, from the little,
chubby A B C D-arian, to the gaunt Jonathan of thirty, who had begun
to feel the need of a little ciphering and geography, in making out
his accounts, or superscribing a business letter. There were rows of
awkward, mop-headed, freckled, red-fisted boys; and rosy-cheeked,
buxom lasses, bursting out of their dresses, half-shy, half-saucy, who
were much more conversant with “apple bees,” and “husking frolics,”
than with grammar or philosophy. There was the parson’s son, and
the squire’s and the blacksmith’s son, besides a few who hadn’t the
remotest idea whose sons they were, having originally been indentured
to their farming masters, by the overseers of the county alms-house.

  Amid these discordant elements, Master Grey moved as serenely as the
August moon of a cloudless night; now patting some little curly head,
cruelly perplexed by “crooked S;” now demonstrating to some slow, older
brain, a stumbling block in Euclid; now closing the creaking door after
an ill-mannered urchin; now overlooking the pot-hooks and trammels
of an unsophisticated scribe, who clutched the pen as if it were a
hoe-handle; now feeding the great, draftless Behemoth of a stove
with green hickory knots, and vainly attempting to thaw out his own
congealed fingers.

  In a remote corner of the school-room sat Zeb Smith, the village
blacksmith’s son, who came into the world with his fists doubled up,
and had been pugilist-ing ever since. It was Zeb’s proud boast that “he
had whipped every schoolmaster who had ever appeared in Frog-town,” and
in his peaceful retreat from under his bent brows, he was now mentally
taking the measure of Master Grey, ending his little reverie with a
loud, protracted whistle.

  Master Grey turned quickly round, and facing his overgrown pupil
of thirty, said in a voice clear as the click of a pistol, “You will
be pleased not to repeat that annoyance, Mr. Smith.” Zeb bent his
gooseberry eyes full upon the master, and gave him a blast of “Yankee
Doodle.”

  All eyes were bent on Master Grey. The gauntlet of defiance was
thrown in his very teeth. Zeb had a frame like an ox, and a fist like a
sledge-hammer, and he knew it. Master Grey was slight, but panther-y;
to their unscientific eyes, he was already victimized.

  Not a bit of it! See! Master Grey’s delicate white fingers are on
Zeb’s check shirt-collar; there is a momentary struggle: lips grow
white; teeth are set; limbs twist, and writhe, and mingle, and now Zeb
lies on the floor with Master Grey’s handsome foot on his brawny chest.
Ah, Master Grey! science is sometimes a match for bone and muscle. Your
boxing master, Monsieur Punchmellow, would have been proud of his pupil.

  Peace restored, Master Grey shakes back from his broad forehead his
curly locks, and summons the first class in geography. A row of country
girls, round as little barrels and red as peonies, stand before him,
their respect and admiration for “the master” having been increased
ten per cent. by his victory over Zeb. Feminity pardons any thing in
a man sooner than lack of courage. The recitation goes off very well,
with the exception of Miss Betsey Jones, who persists in not reciting
at all. Master Grey looks at her: he has conquered a _man_, but that’s
no reason why he should suppose he can conquer a _woman_. He sees
that written in very legible characters in Miss Bessie’s saucy black
eye. Miss Bessy is sent to her seat, and warned to stay after school,
till her lesson is learned and recited perfectly. With admirable
nonchalance, she takes her own time to obey, and commences drawing
little caricatures of the master, which she places in her shoe, and
passes round under the desk, to her more demure petticoat neighbors.

  School is dismissed: the last little straggler is kicking up his
heels in the snow drifts, and Master Grey and Miss Bessie are left
alone. Master Grey inquires if the lesson is learned, and is told
again by Miss Bessie, with a toss of her ringlets, that she has no
intention of learning it. Master Grey again reminds her that the lesson
must be recited before she can go home. Bessie looks mischievously at
the setting sun, and plays with the master’s commands and her apron
strings. An hour passes, and Bessie has not opened the book. Master
Grey consults his watch, and reminds her “that it is growing dark.”
Bessie smiles till the dimples play hide and seek on her cheek,
but she says nothing. Another hour: Master Grey bites his lip, and,
replacing his watch in his pocket, says, “I see your intention, Miss
Betsey. It is quite impossible, as you know, for us to remain here
after dark. To-morrow morning, if your lesson is not learned, I shall
punish you in the presence of the whole school. You can go.”

  “Thank you, sir,” says Bessie, with mock humility, as she crushed her
straw hat down over her bright ringlets.

  “Mischief take these women,” Master Grey was heard to utter, as he
went through the snow by starlight to a cold supper. “Shall I conquer
Zeb, to strike my colors to a girl of sixteen?”

  There was plenty to talk about over the brown bread and milk, at
the farmers’ tea-tables that night; the youngsters all made up their
minds that if there was “a time to play,” it was not in Master Grey’s
school-room, and the old farmers said they were glad the District had
a schoolmaster at last that was good for something, and that they
should think better of city chaps in future for his sake. Even Zeb
himself acknowledged, over his father’s forge, as he mended his broken
suspenders, that Master Grey was a “trump.”

  The nine o’clock bell summoned again the Frog-town pupils to the
District School. Master Grey in vain looked in Bessie’s face for any
sign of submission. She had evidently made up her mind to brave him.
After the usual preliminary exercises, she was called up to recite.
Fixing her saucy black eyes upon him, she said, “I told you I would
_not_ learn that lesson, and I have not learned it.” “And I told
_you_,” said Master Grey, (a slight flush passing over his forehead)
“that I should punish you if you did not learn it? Did I not?” Bessie’s
red lip quivered, but she deigned him no reply.

  “You will hold out your hand, Betsey,” said Mr. Grey, taking up a
large ferule that lay beside him. The color left Bessie’s cheek, but
the little hand was extended with martyr-like determination, and amid a
silence that might be felt, the ferule came down upon it, with justice
as unflinching as if it were not owned by a woman. Betsey was not proof
against this humiliation; she burst into tears, and the answering tear
in Master Grey’s eye showed how difficult and repugnant had been the
task.

  From that day, Master Grey was “monarch of all he surveyed,” and,
truth compels me to own, by none better loved or more implicitly
obeyed, than by Miss Bessie.

  Master Grey’s “boarding week” at my uncle’s had now expired. What a
change had it effected in me! Life was no longer aimless: the old, glad
sparkle had come back to my heavy eye; I no longer dreaded the solitude
of my own thoughts. The dull rain dropping on my chamber roof had its
music for my ears; the stars wore a new and a glittering brightness,
and Winter, with his snowy mantle, frosty breath, and icicle diadem,
seemed lovelier to me than violet-slippered Spring, with roses in her
hair. I still saw Master Grey each day at school. How patiently he bore
with my multiplied deficiencies, and with what a delicate and womanly
appreciation of my extreme sensitiveness, he soothed my wounded pride.
No pale-eyed flower fainting beneath the garish noonday heat ever so
thirsted for the cool dews of twilight, as did my desolate heart for
his soothing tones and kindly words.


CHAPTER V.

  “Betsey,” said my uncle, “we shall want you at home now. It will be
impossible for me to get along without you, unless I hire a hand, and
times are too hard for that: so you must leave school. You’ve a good
home here, for which you ought to be thankful, as I’ve told you before;
but you must work, girl, work! Some how or other the money goes;” (and
he pulled out the old pocket-bock;) “here’s my grocer’s bill--two
shillings for tea, and three shillings for sugar; can’t you do with out
sugar, Hetty? And here’s a dollar charged for a pair of India rubbers.
A dollar is a great deal of money, Hetty; more than you could earn in
a month. And here’s a shilling for a comb; now that’s useless, you
might cut your hair off. It won’t do--won’t do. I had no idea of the
additional expense when I took you in. Josiah ought to have left you
something no man has a right to leave his children for other people to
support; ’tisn’t Christian. I’ve been a professor these twenty years,
and I ought to know. I don’t know as you have any legal claim on me
because you are my niece. Josiah was thriftless and extravagant. I
suppose ’tis in your blood, too, for I can’t find out that you have
begun to pay your way by any chores you have done here. If you must
live on us, (and I can’t say that I see the necessity,) I repeat, I
wish you had been born a boy.”

  “But as I am not a boy, Uncle, and as I do not wish to be a burthen
to you, will you tell me how to support myself?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m sure I don’t know. That is your business. I have
my hands full to attend to my own affairs. I am deacon of the church,
beside being trustee of the Sandwich Island Fund. I don’t get a copper
for the office of deacon; nobody pays _me_ for handing round the
contribution box; not a cent of the money that passes through my hands
goes into my till; not a _mill_ do I have by way of perquisite, for
doling it out to bed-ridden Widow Hall, or asthmatic Mr. Price. Not
a penny the richer was I, for that twenty dollars I collected in the
contribution box at last communion: no, I am a poor man, comparatively
speaking. I may die yet in the almshouse; who knows? You must work,
girl, work; can’t have any drones in my hive.”

  A shadow just then passed the window. I should know that retreating
footstep! Could it be that Master Grey had come to the door with the
intention of calling, and overheard my uncle? At least, then, I was
spared the humiliation of exposing his parsimony.


CHAPTER VI.

  It was the night for the weekly vestry lecture. I was left quite
alone in the old kitchen. My uncle had extinguished the lamp in
leaving, saying that it was “a waste to burn out oil for me.” The
fire, also, had been carefully taken apart, and the brands laid at
an incombustible distance from each other. The old clock kept up
a sepulchral, death-watch tick, and I could hear the falling snow
drifting gloomily against the windows.

  I drew the old, wooden settle closer between the tall andirons, and
sat sorrowfully gazing into the dying embers. What was to become of
me? for it seemed impossible to bear longer the intolerable galling
of my yoke. Even the charity of strangers seemed to me preferable to
the grudging, insulting tolerance of my kindred. But, with my sixteen
years’ experience of quiet valley-life, where should I turn my untried
footsteps? To Him who guideth the little bird through the pathless air,
would I look.

  Weeping, I prayed.

  “My poor child,” said a voice at my side; and Master Grey removed
my hands gently from my tear-stained face, and held them in his own.
“My poor Hetty, life looks very dark to you, does it not? I know all
you suffer. Don’t pain yourself to tell me about it; I overheard your
uncle’s crushing words. I know there are none to love you--none to
care for you--none on whom you can lean. It is a bitter feeling, my
poor child. I, too, have passed through it. You would go from hence,
but where? Life is full of snares, and you are too young, and too
inexperienced to brave them.

  “Hetty,” and Master Grey drew me gently toward him,--“Hetty, could
you be happy with me?”

  Is the ship-wrecked mariner happy, who opens his despairing eyes at
length in the long looked for, long prayed for, home?

  Is the little bird happy, who folds her weary wings safe from the
pursuer’s talons, in her own fleece-lined nest?

  Is the little child happy, who wakes, sobbing, in the gloomy night,
from troubled dreams, to find his golden head still safely pillowed on
the dear, maternal bosom?


CHAPTER VII.

  It was very odd and strange to me, my new home in the great, busy
city; with its huge rows of stores and houses, its myriad restless
feet, and anxious, care-worn faces; its glittering wealth, its squalid
poverty; the slow moving hearse, and the laughing harlequin crowd;
its noisy Sabbaths, and its gorgeous churches, with its jeweled
worshippers, and its sleepy priests; its little children, worldly-wise
and old, and its never-ceasing, busy hum, late into the day’s pale
light. I had no acquaintances: I needed none; for I moved about my
pretty little home as in a glad dream. My husband was still “Master
Grey,” but over a private school of his own, bounded by no “District,”
subject to the despotic dictation of no “Committee.” In his necessary
absence, I busied myself in arranging and re-arranging his books,
papers and wardrobe, thinking the while such _glad_ thoughts! And when
the little mantel clock chimed the hour of return, my cheek flushed, my
heart beat quick, and my eyes grew moist with happy tears, at the sound
of the dear, loved footstep.

  How very nice it seemed to sit at the head of that cheerful little
table--to make, with my own hands, the fragrant cup of tea--to grow
merry with my husband, over crest-fallen Zeb, and poor, stubborn little
Bessie, and my uncle’s time-worn bug-bear of a memorandum book!

  And how proud I was of him, as he sat there correcting some
school-boy’s Greek exercise, while I leaned over his shoulder,
looking attentively at his fine face, and at those unintelligible
hieroglyphics, and blushing that he was so much wiser than his little
Hetty.

  This thought sometimes troubled me. I asked myself, will my husband
never weary of me? I even grew jealous of his favorite authors, of whom
he was so fond. Then I pondered the feasibility of pursuing a course of
reading unknown to him, and astonishing him some day with my profound
erudition. In pursuance of my plan, I would sit demurely down to some
great, wise book; but I saw only my husband’s face looking out at me
from every page, and my self-inflicted task was sure to end in some
blissful dreamy reverie, with which Cupid had much more to do than
Minerva.


CHAPTER VIII.

  “A proposition, Hetty!” said my husband, throwing aside his coat
and hat, and tossing a letter in my lap. “It is from a widow lady,
who desires that I should take charge of her little boy, and give him
a home in my family, while she goes to the continent, to secure some
property lately left her by a foreign relative. It will be advantageous
to us, in a pecuniary way, to have him board with us, unless it should
increase your cares too much. But, as you are so fond of children, it
may, perhaps, after all, prove a pleasant care to you. She is evidently
a superior woman. Every line in her letter shows it.”

  My husband immediately answered in the affirmative, and the child
arrived a week after. He was a fine, intelligent, gentlemanly boy
of eight years, with large hazel eyes, and transparently beautiful
temples: disinclined to the usual sports of childhood, sensitive, shy,
and thoughtful beyond his years--a human dew-drop, which we look to see
exhale. He brought with him a letter from his mother, which powerfully
affected my husband. During its perusal he drew his hand repeatedly
across his eyes, and sat a long while after he had finished reading it,
with his eyes closed, in a deep reverie. By-and-by he said, handing me
the letter, “there is genius there, Hetty. I never read anything so
touchingly beautiful. Mrs. West must be a very talented and superior
woman.”

  I glanced over the letter. It fully justified my husband’s encomiums.
It was a most touching appeal to him to watch with paternal care over
her only child; but while she spoke with a mother’s tenderness of his
endearing qualities, she wished him taught implicitly, that first of
all duties for the young, _obedience_. Then followed allusions to dark
days of sorrow, during which the love of that cherished child, was the
only star in her sky.

  I folded the letter and sat very still, after my husband left, in my
little rocking-chair, thinking. Such a gifted woman as that my husband
should have married. One who could have sympathised with him and shared
his intellectual pursuits; who would have been something besides a toy
to amuse an idle hour, or to minister to his physical necessities.
Perhaps it was of this that my husband was thinking, as he sat there
with his eyes closed over the open letter. Perhaps he had wed me only
from a generous impulse of pity, and that letter had suddenly revealed
to him the happiness of which he was capable with a kindred spirit. I
was very miserable. I wished the letter had never reached us, or that
I had declined the care of the child. Other letters, of course, would
come, and the boy would keep alive the interest in the intervals. I
wept long and bitterly. At length I was aroused by the entrance of
little Charley. A bright flush mounted to his forehead, when he saw
my swollen eyes. He hesitated a moment, then gliding up to my side he
said, sweetly, “Are you sick? Shall I bathe your head? I used to bathe
mamma’s head when it pained her.”

  I stood abashed and rebuked in the child’s angel presence, and taking
the boy, _her_ boy, in my arms, I kissed him as tenderly as if I had
been his mother; while in his own sweet way he told me with childish
confidence of his own dead papa; how much he loved mamma; how many,
many beautiful things he used to bring her, saying that they were not
half good, or half handsome enough for her; how distressed he used to
be if she were ill; how carefully he closed the shutters, and tip-toed
about the house, with his finger on his lip, telling the servants to
close the doors gently; and how he promised him little toys, if he
would not disturb mamma’s slumbers; and then, how like diamonds his
eyes shone, when she got well; and what beautiful flowers he brought
her for her vases; and what a nice, soft-cushioned carriage he brought
for her to take the air; and how tenderly he wrapped the shawls about
her, and how many charges he gave the coachman, to drive slowly and
carefully. And then, how dear papa, at last, grew sick himself; and how
mamma watched day and night beside his bed, forgetting to sleep, or
eat, or drink; and how nobody dared to tell her that the doctor said he
must die; and how papa grew fainter and weaker, and how he said, “Kiss
me, Mary, and lay your cheek to mine; I can’t see you.” And then, how
mamma fainted and was carried out, and for many, many long days didn’t
know even her own little Charley;--and how dreadful it was when she
first waked, and tried to remember what had happened; and how nobody
could comfort her but Charley; and how he used often to wake up in the
night, and find her with a lamp looking at him, because when he was
asleep he looked so much like dear, dead papa; and how bitterly she
would sob when she was sick, because papa was not there to pity her,
and bathe her aching head; and how he (Charley) meant, when he grew
up to be a man, to get a nice house for her, and put everything she
wanted in it, and make her just as happy as he could.

  Well has the Saviour said, “Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.” That
night I bent over little Charley’s bed, blessing the little sleeper for
his angel teachings, with a heart as calm and peaceful as the mirrored
lake, reflecting only the smile of Heaven.

  Time passed on. Life became earnest; for a little heart pulsated
beneath my own, and a strange, sweet, nameless thrill sent to my
chastened lips a trembling prayer. Tiny caps and robes, with many a
hope and fear interwoven in their delicate threads, lay awaiting the
infant’s advent. I, myself should know the height, and breadth, and
depth of a mother’s undying love. What could come between me and _this_
new found treasure?

  Meantime letters continued to come from Charley’s mother to her boy,
and my husband. It was impossible for me to blind myself to his growing
interest in them. On the days they were expected, (for she wrote at
regular intervals,) he would be absent and abstracted, or if any delay
occurred, almost irritable. When they were received, his eye kindled,
his step became elastic, and his whole face grew radiant with happiness.

  As the time drew near for the birth of my infant, I grew timid with
sad forebodings. I was sitting, one evening at twilight, watching the
setting sun, and thinking of the quiet grave it was gilding, where my
silver-haired father slept, in the old church yard, when my husband
entered. An expression of pain flitted over his features, as he looked
at me, and taking my hand, he said, gently, _almost tenderly_, “You
are less well than usual, Hetty; you must not sit here, moping, by
yourself.”

  I laid my head upon his shoulder with a happiness I had not known for
many months. “Listen to me, dear Grey,” said I; “I have a confidence to
repose in you that will ease my heart.

  “It was pity, only, that drew your heart to mine; you do not love
me. I have known it a long while since. At first, the discovery gave
me a pang keener than death; but I have had a long and bitter struggle
with myself, and have conquered. It is not your fault that you cannot
love me. To the many voices of your heart, which cry, ‘Give, give,’
my response is weak and unsatisfying. Your wife should be gifted. She
should sympathise with you in your intellectual pursuits. She should
stimulate your pride, as well as your love. Such an one is Charley’s
mother. Your _heart_ has already wed her, and as God is my witness, I
have ceased to blame you. We cannot help our affections. I cannot help
loving you, though I know her mysterious power over your heart. I have
seen your struggles, your generous self-reproaches, in some sudden
outburst of kindness toward me, after the indulgence of some bright
dream, in which I had no share. Dear Grey, she is worthy of your love.
She has a heart, noble, good and true; a heart purified by suffering.
I see it in every line she writes. Should I not survive the birth of
my infant, I could give your happiness into her keeping without a
misgiving, though I have never looked upon her face.”

  Little Hetty’s noble heart has long since ceased to throb with joy
or pain. To her husband’s breast is folded the babe, for whose little
life her own was yielded up. Threads of silver prematurely mingle amid
his ebon locks; for memory writes only on bereaved hearts the virtues
of the dead, while, with torturing minuteness, she pictures our own
short-comings, for which, alas! we can offer no atonement but our tears.




AUNT HEPSY.


  It was a comical little old shop, “Aunt Hepsy’s,” with its
Lilliputian counter, shelves and stove, and its pigmy assortment
of old-fashioned ginghams, twilled cambrics, red flannels, factory
cotton and homespun calicoes; its miniature window, with its stock
of horn-combs and candy, tin horses and peppermint drops, skeins
of yarn and Godfrey’s Cordial, gaudy picture books, and six-penny
handkerchiefs, from whose center Lafayette and George Washington smiled
approbatively upon the big A’s and little A’s printed round the border.

  “Aunt Hepsy;” so every brimless-hatted urchin in the neighborhood
called her, though it would have puzzled them worse than the
multiplication table, had you asked them why they did so. Year in and
year out, her ruddy English face glowed behind the little shop window.
Sometimes she would be knitting a pair of baby’s socks, sometimes
inventing most astonishing looking bags out of rainbow fragments
of silk or ribbon. Sometimes netting watch-guards, or raveling the
yarn from some old black stocking, to ornament the “place where the
wool ought to grow,” on the head of some Topsy doll she was making.
Sometimes comforting herself with a sly pinch of snuff, or, when
sunbeams and customers were scarce, nodding drowsily over the daily
papers.

  Aunt Hepsy _had_ been a beauty, and her pretty face had won her
a thriftless husband, of whom champagne and cigars had long since
kindly relieved her. And though Time had since forced her to apply
to the perruquier, he had gallantly made atonement by leaving her in
the undisputed possession of a pair of very brilliant black eyes.
Add to this a certain air of coquetry, in the fanciful twist of her
gay-colored turban, and the disposal of the folds of her lace kerchief
over her ample English bust--and you have a faithful daguerreotype of
“Aunt Hepsy.”

  From the window of her little shop she could look out upon the blue
waters of the bay, where lay moored the gallant ships, from whose
tall masts floated the stars and stripes, and whose jolly captains
might often be seen in Aunt Hepsy’s shop, exchanging compliments and
snuff, and their heavy voices heard, recounting long Neptune yarns,
and declaring to the buxom widow that nothing but the little accident
of their being already spliced for life, prevented their immediately
spreading sail with her for the port of Matrimony. Aunt Hepsy
usually frowned at this, and shook her turbaned head menacingly, but
immediately neutralized it, by offering to mend a rip in their gloves,
or replace a truant button on their overcoats.

  It was very odd, how universally popular was Aunt Hepsy. She had
any number of places to “take tea,” beside a standing invitation from
half-a-dozen families, to Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, and to
New-Year’s suppers. She had an eligible seat in church, gratis; an
inexhaustible bottle of sherry for her often infirmities; fresh pies
on family baking days, newspapers for stormy day reading; tickets to
menageries, and invitations to picnics.

  She always procured lodgings at a cheaper rate than anybody else; had
the pleasantest room in the house at that, the warmest seat at table,
the strongest cup of coffee, the brownest slice of toast, the latest
arrival of buckwheats, the second joint of the turkey, and the only
surviving piece of pie. To be sure, she always praised ugly babies,
asked old maids why they _would_ be so cruel as to persist in remaining
unmarried, entreated hen-pecked husbands to use their powerful
influence over their wives to secure to her their custom; begged the
newly fledged clergyman to allow her a private perusal of his last
Sunday’s able discourse; complimented ambitious Esaus on the luxuriant
growth of their very incipient, and microscopically perceptible
whiskers; asked dilapidated, rejected widowers, when they intended
taking their choice of a wife out of a bevy of rosy girls, and declared
to Editors that she might as well try to get along without her looking
glass, as without their interesting newspapers.

  One day, the little shop was shut up. Nine o’clock came--eleven
o’clock, and the shutters were still closed, and Aunt Hepsy so
punctual, too! What _could_ it mean? Old Mrs. Brown was ready to have
fits because she couldn’t get another skein of yarn to finish her old
man’s stockings. Little Pat Dolan had roared himself black in the face,
because he couldn’t spend his cent to buy some maple sugar; and the
little match girl stood shivering at the corner for a place to warm
her poor benumbed fingers, while the disappointed captains stamped
their feet on the snow, stuffed their cheeks with quids, and said it
was “deuced funny,” and an old maid, opposite, who had long prayed that
Aunt Hepsy’s reign might be shortened, laid her skinny forefinger on
her hooked nose, and rolled up the whites of her eyes like a chicken
with the pip.

  It was no great enigma, (at any rate not after you found it out!)
Rich old Mr. Potts ventured into Aunt Hepsy’s shop, one day, to buy a
watch-ribbon. He was very deaf; so Aunt Hepsy had to come round the
counter to wait upon him, and the upshot of it was, that she and Cupid
together, hailed him through an ear-trumpet; and all I know about
it is, that they have now a legalized right to a mutual pillow and
snuff-box, and that the little shop window still remains unopened,
while the old maid hisses between her teeth, as Aunt Hepsy rolls by in
her carriage, “How do you suppose she did it?”




THOUGHTS AT CHURCH.


  I have an old-fashioned way of entering church, before the bells
begin to chime. I enjoy the quiet, brooding stillness. I love to
think of the many words of holy cheer that have fallen there, from
heaven-missioned lips, and folded themselves like snow-white wings over
the weary heart of despair. I love to think of the sinless little ones,
whose pearly temples have here been laved at the baptismal font. I love
to think of the weak, yet strong ones, who have tearfully tasted the
consecrated cup, on which is written, “Do this in remembrance of me.” I
love to think of those self-forgetting, self-exiled, who, counting all
things naught for Gethsemane’s dear sake, are treading foreign shores,
to say to the soul-fettered Pagan, “Behold the Lamb of God.” I love to
think of the loving hearts that at yonder altar have throbbed, side by
side, while the holy man of God pronounced “the twain one.” I love to
think of the seraph smile of which death itself was powerless to rob
the dead saint, over whose upturned face, to which the sunlight lent
such mocking glow, the words, “Dust to dust,” fell upon the pained ear
of love. I love, as I sit here, to list through the half open vestry
door, to the hymning voices of happy Sabbath scholars, sweet as the
timid chirp of morn’s first peeping bird. I love to hear their tiny
feet, as they patter down the aisle, and mark the earnest gaze of
questioning childhood. I love to see the toil-hardened hand of labor
brush off the penitential tear. I love--“_our_ minister.” How very
sad he looks to-day. Are his parish unsympathetic? Does the laborer’s
“hire” come tardily and grudgingly to the overtasked, faithful servant?
Do censorious, dissatisfied spirits watch and wait for his halting?

  Now he rises and says, slowly--musically, “The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.” Why at such sweet, soul-resting words, do his tears
overflow? Why has his voice such a heart quiver? Ah! there is a vacant
seat in the pastor’s pew. A little golden head, that last Sabbath
gladdened our eyes like a gleam of sunlight, lies dreamlessly pillowed
beneath the coffin lid: gleeful eyes have lost their brightness:
cherry lips are wan and mute, and beneath her sable vail the lonely
mother sobs. And so the father’s lip quivers, and for a moment nature
triumphs. Then athwart the gloomy cloud flashes the bow of promise.
He wipes away the blinding tears, and with an angel smile, and upward
glance, he says, “_Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him._”




THE BROTHERS.


  Close the door. One would scarcely think, in this luxurious
atmosphere, that we had left mid-winter behind us. The warm air is
heavy with the odor of blossoming greenhouse plants, over whose
fragrant clusters a tiny fountain tosses its sparkling spray:
bright-winged, sweet-voiced canaries dart, like flashes of sunlight,
through the dark green foliage: beautiful are those sculptured infants,
cheek to cheek, over whose dimpled limbs the crimson drapery throws
such a rosy glow: beautiful is that shrinking Venus, with her pure,
chaste brow, and Eve-like grace: lovely those rare old pictures, to the
artistic eye: beautiful that recumbent statuette of the peerless, proud
“Pauline.”

  Hush! tread softly; on yonder couch a gentleman lies sleeping. His
crimson velvet cap has fallen back from his broad white forehead; his
long curving lashes droop heavily upon his cheek, and his Grecian
profile is as faultless as a sculptor’s dream. Pity, that the stain of
sensuality should have left so legible an impress there.

  A servant enters, bearing a note upon a silver tray. His master
languidly opens a pair of large dark eyes, and beckons him to approach.
As he breaks the seal, a contemptuous sneer disfigures his handsome
lip, and an angry flush mounts to his brow. Motioning the servant away,
he crushes the note between his fingers, muttering,--“No--no--as he
has made his bed, so let him lie in it.” Then walking once or twice
rapidly across the room, he takes up a small volume, and throws himself
again upon the velvet couch. He does not turn the leaves, and if you
peep over his shoulder, you will see that the book is upside down.
His thoughts are far away. He remembers a bright-eyed, open-browed,
guileless-hearted brother, whom early orphanage had thrown upon his
fraternal care; whose trusting nature he had perverted; whose listening
ear he had poisoned with specious sophistries and worldly maxims; whom
he had introduced to the wine party, where female virtue was held
in derision, and to the “green room,” where the foreign _danseuse_
understood well how to play her part; whom he had initiated into modern
follies and dissipations, and then launched upon the Charybdis of
fashionable society, without chart, or rudder, or compass, other than
his own headstrong passions and unbridled will.

  Soon came a rumor, at first vague and undefined, and then voraciously
seized upon and circulated by Paul Pry penny-a-liners, (who recked
little, in their avidity for a paragraph, of broken-hearted mothers
or despairing gray-haired fathers,) of a true heart that had been
betrayed, of a disgraced household, of a fair brow that must henceforth
walk the earth shame-branded. Then from his avenging pursuers the rash
boy fled for refuge to him who had first turned his youthful footsteps
aside from truth and honor. He was repulsed with scorn; not because he
had wronged his own soul and hers whose star had forever set in night,
but because he had not more skilfully and secretly woven the meshes for
his victim.

  Across the seas, amid the reckless debauchery of God-forgetting
Paris, the miserable boy sought oblivion; welcoming with desperate
eagerness the syren Pleasure, in every chameleon shape that could
stifle conscience or drown torturing memory. Sometimes by a lucky
throw of the dice he was enabled to shine as the Adonis of some
ball, or theatre, or gay saloon: sometimes destitute as the humblest
_chiffonier_, who suns himself in the public square, and solicits
charity of the indifferent passer-by. In the rosy glow of morning, the
bright stars paled while Harry sat at the enticing gaming table, till
even those accustomed to breathe the polluted atmosphere of those gates
of perdition, turned shuddering away, from the fiendish look of that
youthful face.

  Nature revenged herself at last. Wearisome days of sickness came,
and he who was nurtured in luxury, was dependent upon the charity of
grudging strangers.

  Oh! what a broad, clear beam eternity throws upon the crooked
by-paths of sin! how like swift visions pass the long forgotten
prayer at the blessed mother’s knee; the long-forgotten words of Holy
Writ; the soothing vesper hymn, of holy time; the first cautious,
retrograding step--the gradual searing of conscience, till the barrier
between right and wrong is ruthlessly trampled under foot; the broken
resolutions, the misspent years, the wasted energies; the sins against
one’s own soul, the sins against others; the powerless wish to pray,
’mid paroxysms of bodily pain; the clinging hold on life--the anxious
glance at the physician--the thrilling question, “Doctor, is it life or
death?”

  Poor Harry! amid the incoherent ravings of delirium, the good little
grisette learned his sad history. Her little French heart was touched
with pity. Through her representations, on his partial restoration to
health, a sufficient sum was subscribed by the American consul, and
some of his generous countrymen, to give him the last chance for his
life, by sending him to breathe again his native air. Earnestly he
prayed that the sea might not be his sepulchre.

  Tearfully he welcomed the first sight of his native shore.
Tremblingly he penned those few lines to the brother whose face he so
yearned to see--and on whose fraternal breast it would seem almost easy
to die. Anxiously he waited the result, turning restlessly from side
to side, till beaded drops of agony started from his pallid temples.
Walter would not refuse his _last_ request. No--no. The proud man would
at least, at the grave’s threshold, forget that “vulgar rumor” had
coupled his patrician name with disgrace. Oh, why had the messenger
such leaden footsteps? when life and strength like hour-glass sands,
were fleeting! A step is heard upon the stairs! A faint flush, like the
rosy tinting of a sea-shell, brightens the pallid face.

  “No answer, sir,” gruffly says the messenger.

  A smothered groan of anguish, and Harry turns his face to the wall,
and tears, such only as despair can shed, bedew his pillow.

  “_Do_ go, dear Walter; ’tis your own brother who asks it. If he has
sinned, has he not also suffered? We all so err, so need forgiveness.
Oh, take back those hasty words; let him die on your breast, for _my_
sake, Walter,” said the sweet pleader, as her tears fell over the hand
she pressed.

  “That’s my own husband,” said the happy Mary, as she saw him relent.
“Go _now_, dear Walter. Take away the sting of those cruel words, while
yet you may, and carry him these sweet flowers, he used to love, from
me. Quick, dear Walter.”

       *       *       *       *       *

  “This way, sir, this way. Up another flight,” said the guide, gazing
admiringly at the fine figure before him, enveloped in a velvet Spanish
cloak. “Second door to the left, sir. Maybe the gentleman’s asleep now;
he’s been very quiet for some time. Seen trouble, sir, I reckon. ’Tis
not age that has drawn those lines on his handsome face. He’s not long
for this world, God rest his soul. That’s right, sir; that’s the door.
Good day, sir.”

  Walter stood with his finger on the latch. He had at all times a
nervous shrinking from sickness--a fastidious horror of what he termed
“disagreeables.” He half repented that he had suffered a woman’s tears
to unsettle his purpose. Perhaps Harry would reproach him. (His own
conscience was prompter to that thought.) There he stood, irresolutely
twirling Mary’s lovely flowers in his nervous grasp.

  If Harry should reproach him!

  Slowly he opened the door. The flowers fell from his hand! Was that
attenuated, stiffened form his own, warm-hearted, bright-eyed, gallant
young brother?

  “Reproach?”

  Oh, Walter, there is no “reproach” like that passionless upturned
face; no words so crushing as the silence of those breathless lips; no
misery like the thought that those we have injured are forever blind to
our gushing tears, and deaf to our sobs of repentance.




CURIOUS THINGS.

       CURIOUS: The exaggerated anxiety of wives to see the women who
     were formerly loved by their husbands.--_Exchange._


  Well, yes--rather curious; there are a great many curious things
in this world. Curious, your husband always perceives that you are
“sitting in a draft,” whenever one of your old lovers approaches you
in a concert room; curious he insists upon knowing who gave you that
pretty gold ring on your little finger; curious that you can never open
a package of old letters, without having his married eyes peeping over
your shoulder; curious he never allows you to ride on horseback, though
everybody says you have just the figure for it; curious he always sends
his partner on all the little business trips of the firm; curious such
an ugly frown comes over his face when he sees certain cabalistic marks
in a masculine hand, in the margin of your favorite poet; curious that
he will not let you name your youngest boy Harry, unless you tell him
your confidential reasons; curious he is always most gracious to the
most uninteresting men who visit the house; and _very_ curious, and
decidedly disagreeable, that whenever you ask him for money, he is so
busy reading the newspaper that he can’t hear you.




THE ADVANTAGES OF A HOUSE IN A FASHIONABLE SQUARE.


  “Whom did you say wished to see me, Bridget?”

  The broad-faced Irish girl handed her mistress a card.

  “‘Mrs. John Hunter!’ was there _ever_ anything so unfortunate? had
she called on any other day in the week, I should have been prepared to
receive her, but of a ‘washing day,’ when nothing but a calico wrapper
stands Master George’s clawings and climbings; when the nursery maid is
in the kitchen, and the baby on my hands for the day; when my ‘Honiton
collar’ is in soak, the parlor window curtains in the wash-tub, and the
dimensions of the whole family, big and little, are flapping on the
clothes-line, displaying their rents and patches in full view of the
parlor windows! Was there ever anything so unfortunate? What _could_
induce Mrs. John Hunter to call on a washing day?”

  But what was “washing day” to Mrs. John Hunter, who lived in St.
John’s Square, kept four servants, and patronized a laundry? What did
she know of Mondays’ picked up dinners and littered parlors, cluttered
china closet, and untidied nurseries? Mrs. John Hunter, who came down
to breakfast every morning in a fawn-colored silk morning dress,
trimmed with cherry, over an elaborately embroidered white skirt;
in a cobweb lace cap, silk stockings, and the daintiest of Parisian
toilette slippers; how could _she_ see the necessity of going down
cellar, after breakfast, to see if the pork was under brine, the pickle
jar covered, and the preserves unfermented? What did _she_ know about
washing up breakfast-cups, polishing the silver sugar bowl, filling
the astral lamp, counting up the silver forks and spoons, or mending
that little threadbare place in the carpet, that would soon widen into
an ugly rent, if neglected? What did she know about washing children’s
faces for school, or finding their missing mittens, or seeing that
Webster’s spelling book and a big apple were safely stowed away in
their satchels? How did she (whose family broadcloth the tailor mended)
know that Monday was always the day when husbands threw their coats
into wives’ lap “for just one stitch,” (which translated, means new
sleeve-linings, new facings for the flaps, a new set of buttons down
the front, and a general resuscitation of dilapidated button-holes.)
How did she know that the baby always got up a fit of colic on
washing days, and made it a point to dispense with its usual forenoon
nap?--that all the collectors for benevolent societies, and bores in
general, preferred it to any other day in the calendar?--that school
teachers always selected it to ferule children for sneezing without
permission--that milkmen never could spare you, on that day, your usual
share of milk by two quarts--that the coal, potatoes, starch, soap,
molasses, and vinegar always gave out on Monday--that “the minister”
always selected it for his annual call, and country cousins for a
“protracted meeting?” How should the patrician, Mrs. John Hunter, know
all that?

  There she sat in the parlor taking notes, after the usual fashion of
lady callers, while Mrs. John Smith hurriedly tied on her bonnet, to
hide her disheveled tresses, threw on a shawl, and made her appearance
in the parlor as if “just returned from a walk.”

  How their tongues ran! how fashions and gossip were discussed; how
Mrs. Smith admired Mrs. Hunter’s new dress hat; how the latter lady
advised Mrs. Smith to “insist on her husband’s moving from such an
undesirable neighborhood into a more aristocratic locality;” and how
Mrs. Smith wondered that the idea had never struck her before; and how
Mrs. Hunter told her that of course Mr. Smith would refuse at first,
but that she must either worry him into it, or seize upon some moment
of conjugal weakness to extort a binding promise from him to that
effect; and how the little wife blushed to find herself conniving at
this feminine piece of diabolism.

  Mrs. John Smith’s husband commenced life in a provision store. He was
well acquainted with cleavers, white aprons, and spare-ribs--was on
hand early and late to attend to business--trusted nobody--lived within
his income, and consequently made money.

  Miss Mary Wood kept a dressmaker’s establishment just over the way.
Very industriously she sat through the long summer days, drooping her
pretty golden ringlets over that never-ending succession of dresses.
Patiently she “took in,” and “let out,” bias-ed, flounced, tucked,
gathered and plaited, at the weathercock option of her customers.
Uneasily she leaned her head against her little window at sundown,
and earnestly Mr. John Smith wished he could reprieve forever from
such drudgery those taper little fingers. Very tempting was the little
basket of early strawberries, covered with fresh green leaves, that
went across the way to her one bright summer morning--and as red as the
strawberries, and quite as tempting, looked Miss Mary’s cheek to Mr.
John Smith, as she sat at the window, reading the little billet-doux
which he slily tucked into one corner.

  The milkman wondered why Mr. Smith had grown so particular about the
flowers in the bouquets his little grand-daughter plucked for sale,
and why there must _always_ be “a rose-bud in it.” Miss Rosa Violet
couldn’t imagine what ailed her dressmaker, Miss Wood, (who was always
so scrupulous in executing orders,) to make her boddice round, when she
told her so particularly to make it pointed. The little sewing girls
employed in Miss Wood’s shop were “afraid she was getting crazy,” she
smiled so often to herself, broke so many needles, and made so many
mistakes in settling up their accounts on pay day; and very great was
their astonishment one day, after finishing a pretty bridal dress, to
find that Miss Wood was to wear it herself to church the very next
Sunday!

  One bright June morning found the little dressmaker in a nice, two
story brick house, furnished with every comfort, and some luxuries; for
the warm-hearted John thought nothing half good enough for his little
golden-haired bride. As time passed on, other little luxuries were
added; including two nice, fat, dimpled babies; and within the last
year John had bought the house they lived in, and at Mary’s suggestion
introduced gas, to lighten the labors of the servant, and also added a
little bathing-room to the nursery. His table was well provided--the
mother’s and children’s wardrobes ample, and not a husband in Yankee
land was prouder or happier than John Smith, when on a sunshiny Sunday,
he walked to church with his pretty wife, whose golden curls still
gleamed from beneath her little blue bonnet, followed by Katy and
Georgy with their shining rosy faces, and pretty Sunday dresses.

  It was quite time the honeymoon should wane, but still it showed no
signs of decrease. Little bouquets still perfumed Mary’s room. John
still sprung to pick up her handkerchief, or aid her in putting on her
cloak or shawl. The anniversary of their wedding day always brought her
a kind little note, with some simple remembrancer. Trifles, do you call
these? Ah, a wife’s happiness is made or marred by just such “trifles.”

       *       *       *       *       *

  “Katy will make somebody’s heart ache one of these days”, said John
Smith to his wife. “Katy will be a beauty. Did you hear me, Mary?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, drooping her bright ringlets till they swept
John’s cheek, “and I was thinking how I hoped she would marry well,
and whether it would not be better for us to move into a more genteel
neighborhood, and form a new set of acquaintances.”

  “_My_ little wife getting ambitious!” said John, smoothing her
ringlets back from her white forehead; “and where would you like to
live, Mary?”

  “St. John’s Square is a nice place,” said the little wife, timidly.

  “Yes; but my dear Mary, rents there are enormous, and those large
houses require a greater outlay of money than you have any idea of. The
furniture which looks pretty and in good taste here, would be quite
shabby in such an elegant establishment. The pretty de laine, which
fits your little round figure so charmingly, must give place to a silk
or brocade. Katy and Georgy must doff their simple dresses, for velvet
and embroidery; broad-faced, red-fisted Bridget must make way for a
French cook. The money which I have placed in the bank for a nest-egg
for you and the children in case of my death, must be withdrawn to
meet present demands. But we will talk of this another time: good-by
Mary, dear; not even your dear face must tempt me away from business;
good-by,” and he kissed his hand to her, as he walked rapidly out the
door.

  But somehow or other Mary’s words kept ringing in John’s ears. It
was very true Katy must be married some day, and then he ran over the
circle of their acquaintance; the Stubbses, and the Joneses, and the
Jenkinses--good enough in their way, but (he confessed to himself) _not
just the thing for his Katy_. John was ambitious too: Mary was right;
they ought to consider that Katy would soon be a woman.

  It is not to be supposed because John Smith never sported white kids,
save on his wedding day, that he was not a man of taste; by no means.
Not an artistic touch of Mary’s feminine fingers, from the twist of a
ringlet or ribbon to the draping of a curtain, the judicious disposal
of a fine engraving, or the harmonious blending of colors in a mantel
bouquet, escaped him. It was his joy and pride to see her glide about
his home, beautifying almost unconsciously everything she touched; and
then, he remembered when she was ill, and Bridget had the oversight of
the parlors--what a different air they had; how awkwardly the chairs
looked plastered straight against the wall--how ugly the red cloth all
awry on the centre table; what a string-y look the curtains had, after
her clumsy fingers had passed over them. Yes, Mary would grace a house
in St. John’s Square, and if it would make her any happier to go there
(and here he glanced at his ledger)--why, go she should--for she was
just the prettiest, and dearest, and most loving little Mary who ever
answered to that poetical name. What would full coffers avail him, if
Mary should die?--and she might die first. His health was good--his
business was good. Mary and Katy _should_ live in St John’s Square.

  Mary and Katy _did_ live in St John’s Square. The upholsterer crammed
as many hundreds as possible into the drawing rooms, in the shape of
vis-a-vis antique chairs, velvet sofas, damask curtains, mirrors,
tapestry, carpets, and a thousand other nick-nacks, too numerous to
mention: then the blinds and curtains shut out the glad sunlight,
lest the warm beams should fade out the rich tints of the carpets and
curtains, and left it as fine and as gloomy as any other fashionable
drawing room. There was a very pretty prospect from Mary’s chamber
windows, but she never allowed herself to enjoy it, after Mrs. John
Hunter told her, that it was considered “decidedly snobbish to be seen
at the front window.” The Smiths took their meals in a gloomy basement,
where gas was indispensable at mid-day. Mary was constantly in fear
that the servants would spoil the pictures and statues in the parlor,
so she concluded to sweep and dust it herself, before there was any
probability of Mrs. John Hunter’s being awake in the morning. As this
was something of a tax, she and Mr. Smith and the children kept out of
it, except on Sundays and when company called, burrowing under ground
the residue of the time in the afore-mentioned basement.

  Directly opposite Mrs. Smith lived Mrs. Vivian Grey, the leader of
the aristocracy (so Mrs. Hunter informed her) in St. John’s Square.
It was a great thing to be noticed by Mrs. Vivian Grey. Mrs. Hunter
sincerely hoped she would patronise Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Hunter, after a
minute survey, pronounced Mrs. Smith’s establishment quite _comme il
faut_, but suggested that a _real_ cachemire should be added as soon as
possible to Mrs. Smith’s wardrobe, as Mrs. Grey considered that article
quite indispensable to a woman of fashion. She also suggested that
Mrs. Smith should delicately hint to her husband the propriety of his
engaging a man servant, which appendage was necessary to give a certain
_distingué_ finish to the establishment; an Irishman would do, if well
trained, but a _black_ man was more fashionable, provided he was not
_green_--and Mrs. Hunter smiled at her own wit.

  The cachemire was added--so was the black servant-man. Katy no
longer skipped and jumped, but minced in corsets and whalebone. She
never _ate_ unless at a private lunch with mamma. Mr. John Smith staid
late at his counting-room, and looked anxious, and two ugly lines made
their appearance on Mrs. Mary’s fair forehead. The French cook gave
away provisions enough to feed an entire family of French emigrants.
The black man-servant pulled up his dicky and informed Mrs. Smith
that it was at the price of his reputation to live with a family who
dispensed with the use of finger bowls, and the house-maid (who had the
honor of being descended from the establishment of Mrs. Vivian Grey)
declined remaining with a family who didn’t keep a private carriage.

  Mrs. Vivian Grey was _not_ baited by the real cachemire, and her
son, little Julius Grey, a precocious youth of ten, told little George
Smith that his mamma had forbidden him playing marbles with a boy whose
father had kept a provision store.

  A scurrilous penny paper published a burlesque of Mrs. Smith’s first
grand party, on the coming out of Miss Katy, in which, among other
allusions to Mr. Smith’s former occupation, the ball-room was said to
be “elegantly festooned with sausages.” This added “the last ounce to
the camel’s back;” even Mrs. Hunter’s tried friendship was not proof
against such a test.

  A council of war was called. Mrs. Smith begged her husband, as her
repentant arms encircled his dicky, to buy a place in the country. John
very gladly consented to turn his plebeian back forever on the scene of
their humiliation; and what with strawberries and cherries, peaches,
pic-nics, early rising and light hearts, the Smith family have once
more recovered their equanimity, and can afford to laugh when “St.
John’s Square” and Mrs. John Hunter are mentioned.




WINTER IS COMING.


  Welcome his rough grip! welcome, the fleet horse with flying feet,
and arching throat, neck-laced with merry bells; welcome, bright eyes,
and rosy cheeks, and furred robes, and the fun-provoking sleigh-ride;
welcome, the swift skater who skims, bird-like, the silvery pond;
welcome, Old Santa Claus with his horn of plenty; welcome, the “Happy
New-Year,” with her many-voiced echoes, and gay old Thanksgiving, with
his groaning table, old friends and new babies; welcome, for the bright
fireside, the closed curtains, the dear, unbroken home-circle, the
light heart, the merry jest, the beaming smile, the soft “good-night,”
the downy bed, and rosy slumbers.

       *       *       *       *       *


WINTER IS COMING.

  Alas for his rough grip! the barrel of meal is empty, and the cruse
of oil fails. Sharp winds flutter thin rags ’round shivering limbs.
There are pinched features, and benumbed feet, and streaming eyes,
and repulsed hands, and despairing hearts; there are damp corners,
and straw pallets, and hollow coughs, and hectic cheeks; there are
dismantled roofs, through which the snow gently drops its white,
icy pall over the wasted limbs of the dying; there are babes whose
birthright is poverty, whose legacy is shame, whose baptism is tears,
_whose little life is all winter_.




“THE OTHER SEX.”

       “Let cynics prattle as they may, our existence here, without
     the presence of the other sex, would be only a dark and
     cheerless void.”


  _Which_ “other sex?” Don’t be so obscure. Dr. Beecher says, “that
a writer’s ideas should stand out like rabbits’ ears, so that the
reader can get hold of them.” If you allude to the female sex, I
don’t subscribe to it. I wish they were all “translated.” If there is
anything that gives me the sensations of a landsman on his first sea
voyage, it is the sight of a bonnet. Think of female friendship! Two
women joining the Mutual Admiration Society; emptying their budget
of love affairs; comparing bait to entrap victims; sighing over the
same rose leaf; sonnetizing the same moonbeam; patronizing the same
milliner, and _exchanging female kisses_! (Betty, hand me my fan!)

  Well, let either have one bonnet or one lover more than the
other--or, if they are blue stockings, let either be one round the
higher on Fame’s ladder--bodkins and darning needles! what a tempest!
Caps and characters in such a case are of no account at all. Oh, there
never should be but one woman alive at a time. Then the fighting would
be all where it belongs--in the masculine camp. What a time there’d
be, though! Wouldn’t she be a belle? Bless her little soul! how
she would queen it. It makes me clap my hands to think of it. _The
only woman in the world!_ If it were I, shouldn’t they all leave off
smoking, and wearing those odious plaid continuations? Should they ever
wear an outside coat, with the flaps cut off; or a Kossuth hat, or a
yellow Marseilles vest?--or a mammoth bow on their neck-ties; or a
turnover dickey; or a watch-chain; or a ring on the little finger?--or
any other abomination or off-shoot of dandyism whatsoever? Shouldn’t
I politely request them all to touch their hats, instead of jerking
their heads, when they bowed? Wouldn’t I coax them to read me poetry
till they had the bronchitis? Wouldn’t they play on the flute, and sing
the soul out of me? And then if they were sick, wouldn’t I pet them,
and tell them all sorts of comicalities, and make time fly like the
mischief? Shouldn’t wonder!




SOLILOQUY OF MR. BROADBRIM.


  “There’s another of Miss Fiddlestick’s articles! She’s getting
too conceited, that young woman! Just like all newly-fledged
writers--mistakes a few obscure newspaper puffs for the voice of the
crowd, and considers herself on the top round of the literary ladder.
It will take me to take the wind out of her sails. I’ll dissect her,
before I’m a day older, as sure as my name is Ezekiel Broadbrim. I
don’t approve her style; never did. It’s astonishing to me that the
editor of The Green Twig dare countenance it, when he knows a man of
my influence could annihilate her with one stroke of my pen. She has
talent of a certain inferior order, but nothing to speak of. She’s
an unsafe model to follow; will lead her tribe of imitators into
tremendous mistakes. It’s a religious duty for a conspicuous sentinel,
like myself, on Zion’s walls, to sound the blast of alarm;--can’t
answer it to my conscience to be silent any longer. It might be
misconstrued. The welfare of the world in general, and her soul in
particular, requires a very decided expression of my disapprobation.
I’m sorry to annihilate her, but when Ezekiel Broadbrim makes up his
mind what is the path of duty, a bright seraph couldn’t stop him.
Perhaps I may pour a drop of the balm of consolation afterwards,
but it depends altogether upon whether I succeed in bringing her
into a penitential frame of mind. It’s my private opinion she is an
incorrigible sinner. Hand me my pen, John. Every stroke of it will
tell.”




WILLY GREY.


  A stern, unyielding, line-and-plummet, May-flower descendant, was old
Farmer Grey, of Allantown, Connecticut. Many a crop had he planted,
many a harvest had he garnered in, since he first became owner of
Glen Farm. During that time, that respected individual, “the oldest
inhabitant,” could not remember ever to have seen him smile. The
village children shied close to the stone wall, and gave him a wide
berth, when he passed. Even the cats and dogs laid their ears back, and
crept circumspectly by him, with one eye on his whip-lash.

  Farmer Grey considered it acceptable to the God who painted the
rainbow, and expanded the lily, and tinted the rose, to walk the
bright earth with his head bowed like a bulrush, and his soul clad in
sackcloth. No mercy fell from the lips of _his_ imaginary Saviour; no
compassion breathed in His voice; no love beamed in His eye; His sword
of justice was never sheathed.

  The old farmer’s wife was a gentle, dependent creature, a delicate
vine, springing up in a sterile soil, reaching forth its tendrils
vainly, for some object to cling to. God, in his mercy, twined them
lovingly around a human blossom. Little Willy partook of his mother’s
sensitive, poetical nature. A yearning spirit looked out from the
fathomless depths of his earnest eyes. Only eight short summers the
gentle mother soothed her boy’s childish pains, and watched his
childish slumbers. While _he_ grew in strength and beauty, _her_ eye
waxed dim, and her step grew slow and feeble.

  And so sweet memories were only left to little Willy,--dear, loving
eyes, whose glance ever met his on waking; a fair, caressing hand, that
wiped away his April tears; a low, gentle voice, sweet to his childish
ear as a seraph’s hymning.

  Willy’s father told him that “his mother had gone to Heaven,” John,
the plough-boy, said “she was lying in the church-yard.” Willy could
not understand this. He only knew that the house had grown dark and
empty, and that his heart ached when he stayed there; and so he
wandered out in the little garden, (his mother’s garden;) but the
flowers looked dreary, too; and her pretty rose-vine lay trailing its
broken buds and blighted blossoms in the dust.

  Then Willy crept up to his father’s side, and looked up in his face,
but there was something there that made him afraid to lay his little
hand upon his knee, or climb into his lap, or in any way unburden
his little heart; so he turned away, more sorrowful than before, and
wandered into his mother’s chamber, and climbed up in her chair, and
opened her drawer, to look at her comb and hair brush; and then he went
to the closet, and passed his little hand, caressingly, over her empty
dresses, and leaning his little curly head against them, sobbed himself
to sleep.

  By and by, as years passed on, and the child grew older, he learned
to wander out in the woods and fields, and unbosom his little yearning
heart to Nature. Reposing on her breast, listening to the music of her
thousand voices, his unquiet spirit was soothed as with a mother’s
lullaby. With kindling eye, he watched the vivid lightnings play; or,
saw the murky east flush, like a timid bride, into rosy day; or, beheld
the shining folds of western clouds fade softly into twilight; or,
gazed at the Queen of Night, as she cut her shining path through the
cloudy sky; or, questioned, with earnest eyes, the glittering stars.

  All this but ill pleased the old farmer. He looked upon the
earth only with an eye to tillage; upon the sloping hill, with its
pine-crowned summit, only with an eye to timber; upon the changeful
skies, only as reservoirs for moistening and warming his crops; upon
the silver streams, that laced the emerald meadows, only as channels
for irrigation; upon the climbing vine, as an insidious foe to joists,
and beams, and timbers; and upon flowers, only as perfumed aristocrats,
crowding and over-topping the free-soil democracy of cabbage, onions,
and potatoes.

  In vain poor Will tried to get up, “to order,” an enthusiasm for
self-acting hay-cutters, patent plows, rakes, hoes, and harrows. In
vain, when Sunday came, and he was put “on the limits,” did the old
farmer, with a face ten-fold more ascetic than the cowled monk, strive
to throw a pall of gloom over that free, glad spirit, by rehearsing, in
his ear, a creed which would forever close the gate of heaven on every
dissenter, or inculcate doctrines, which, if believed, would fill our
lunatic asylums with the frantic wailings of despair.

  Restlessly did Will, with cramped limbs and fettered spirit, sit out
the tedious hours of that holy day, which should be the “most blessed
of all the seven,” and watch, with impatient eye, the last golden beam
of the Sabbath sun sink slowly down behind the western hills.

  Oh, well-meaning, but mistaken, parent! let but one loving smile play
over those frigid lips: let but one tear of sympathy flood that stony
eye: let but _one drop_ from that overflowing fountain of love, that
wells up in the bosom of the Infinite, moisten the parched soil of that
youthful heart! Open those arms but once, and clasp him to the paternal
heart; for even now, his chafed spirit, like a caged bird, flutters
against its prison bars; even now, the boy’s unquiet ear catches the
far-off hum of the busy world: even now, his craving heart beats wildly
for the voice of human love!

       *       *       *       *       *

  Weary feet, houseless nights, the scant meal, and the oft-repulsed
request: what are _they_ to the strong nerve, and bounding pulse, and
hopeful heart of the young adventurer? Laurel wreaths, dizzy places on
Ambition’s heights, have not its aspirants reached them by just such
rugged steps?

  “Will” is in the city. Will sits upon the steps of the New York City
Hall, reading a penny paper: he has begged it from a good-natured
newsboy, who has also shared with him a huge slice of gingerbread.
As Will’s eye glances over the sheet, it falls upon the following
paragraph:

     “PROSPECTUS OF THE WEEKLY CHRONICLE.

  “The Weekly Chronicle is a paper founded on the demands of the
age for a first-class journal. It soars above all sectional and
personal considerations, and fearlessly proffers its feeble aid, in
developing the natural resources of the country, fostering the genius
of the people, rewarding meritorious effort in every department
of art, exalting virtue, however humble, and confounding vice,
however powerful. The editor and proprietor of the Chronicle is Mr.
Philanthropas Howard; office, No. 199 Cloud-street.

  “Boy wanted immediately at the above office: one from the country
would be preferred.”

       *       *       *       *       *

  Will threw down the paper, and started to his feet: “199
Cloud-street?” He asked orange-women; he asked image-boys; he asked
merchants; he asked clerks; he asked lawyers; he asked clients; he
investigated cellars; he explored attics; he traveled through parks,
and through alleys; till finally, he coaxed a graceless, bare-footed
urchin to shew him the way.

  Mr. John Howard, editor and proprietor of the Weekly Chronicle, went
upon the principle of paying nothing where nothing would pay, and
paying as little as possible where he could get something for next to
nothing. It was a fixed principle and confirmed practice with him,
never to pay anything for contributions to the Chronicle. He considered
that the great advantage that would accrue to an author from having
his or her articles in his paper, would be ample remuneration. At
the moment Will’s eye first fell upon him, he was reposing in a huge
leathern arm chair, in the corner of his sanctum. His proportions very
much resembled an apoplectic bag of flour, surmounted by an apple.
His head was ornamented with sparse spires of fiery red hair; on his
cheeks, a pair of cream-colored whiskers were feebly struggling into
life; and sundry tufts of the same color, under his chin, shadowed
forth his editorial sympathy with the recent “Beard Movement.”
Before him was a table, of doubtful hue and architecture, laden with
manuscripts, accepted, rejected, and under consideration; letters of
all sizes, opened and unopened, prepaid and unpaid, saucy and silly,
defiant and deprecatory. There was also an inkstand, crusted with
dirt and cobwebs; a broken paper weight, pinning down some bad money,
paid by distant subscribers; a camphene lamp, with a broken pedestal,
propped up by a Directory on one side, and Walker’s Dictionary on
the other; sundry stumps of cigars; a half-eaten apple; a rind of an
orange; a lady’s glove, and a box of bilious pills.

  Will stepped before him, and made known his errand. Mr. John Howard
looked at him, with a portentous scowl, inspected him very much as he
would a keg of doubtful mackerel, and then referred him to the foreman
of the office, Mr. Jack Punch. Jack had been victimized, in the way of
office boys, for an indefinite period, with precocious city urchins,
who smoked long nines, talked politics, discussed theatricals, and knew
more of city haunts than the police themselves. Of course he lost no
time in securing a boy to whose verdant feet the plow-soil was still
clinging. Will’s business was to open the office at half past six in
the morning, sweep it out, make the fires, go to the post-office for
letters and exchanges, wrap up papers for new subscribers, carry them
to the post, and see that the mail was properly “got off.” To all these
requirements, Will immediately subscribed.

  On Will’s daily tramps to and from the office, he was obliged to pass
Lithe & Co.’s magnificent show window, where the choicest pictures and
engravings were constantly exposed for sale. There he might be seen
loitering, entranced and spellbound, quite oblivious of the Chronicle,
hour after hour, weaving bright visions--building air castles, with
which his overseer, Mr. Jack Punch, had little sympathy. Yes; Will had
at length found out what he was made for. He knew _now_ why he had lain
under the trees, of a bright summer day, watching the fleecy clouds go
sailing by, in such a dreamy rapture; why the whispering leaves, and
waving fields of grain, and drooping branches of graceful trees, and
the mirror-like beauty of the placid lake, reflecting a mimic heaven;
why the undulating hills, and mist-wreathed valleys, with their wealth
of leaf, and buds and blossom, filled his eyes with tears and his soul
with untold joy, and why, when slumber sealed each weary lid under the
cottage eaves, he stood alone, hushing his very breath, awestruck,
beneath the holy stars.

  Poor Will, his occupation became so distasteful! Poor Will, winged
for a “bird of paradise,” and forced to be a mole, burrowing under the
earth, when he would fain try his new-found pinions! To Jack’s intense
disgust, he soon detected Will in drawing rude sketches on bits of
paper, stray wrappers, and backs of letters; even the walls were “done
in crayons,” by the same mischievous fingers. His vision was so filled
“with the curved line of beauty,” that he was constantly committing
the most egregious blunders. He misplaced the bundles of newspapers
which he carried to the post-office; placing the “north” packages
on the “south” table, the east on the north, the south on the east,
&c.; mixing them up generally and indescribably and inextricably, so
that the subscribers to the “Weekly Chronicle” did not receive their
papers with that precision and regularity which is acknowledged to be
desirable, particularly in small country places, where the blacksmith’s
shop, the engine house, and “the newspaper” form a trio not to be
despised by the simple-hearted, primitive farmers.

  Jack, whose private opinion it was that he should have been
christened Job, being obliged to shoulder all the short-comings of his
assistants, and being worked up to a pitch of frenzy by letters from
incensed subscribers, which Mr. Howard constantly thrust in his face,
very unceremoniously ejected Will from the premises, one morning, by a
vigorous application of the toe of his boot.

  The world was again a closed oyster to Will. How to open it? that was
the question. Our hero thought the best place to consider the matter
was at Lithe & Co.’s shop-window. Just as he reached it, a gentleman
passed out of the shop, followed by a lad bearing a small framed
landscape. Perhaps the gentleman was an artist! Perhaps he could employ
him in some way! Will resolved to follow him.

  Up one street and down another, round corners and through
squares--the gentleman’s long legs seemed to be shod with the famed
seven-leagued boots. At length he stopped before the door of an
unpretending looking building, and handing the lad who accompanied him
a bit of money, he took from him the picture, and was just springing
up the steps, when he lost his balance, and the picture was jerked
violently from his hand, but only to be caught by the watchful Will,
who restored it to its owner uninjured.

  “Thank you, my boy,” said the gentleman, “you have done me a greater
service than you think for;” at the same time offering him some money.

  “No, I thank you,” said Will, proudly. “I do not wish to be paid for
it.”

  “As you please, Master Independence,” replied the gentleman,
laughing; “but is there no other way I can serve you?”

  “Are you an artist?” asked Will.

  The gentleman raised his eyebrows, with a comical air, and replied,
“Well, sometimes I think I am, and then, again, I don’t know; but what
if I were?”

  “I should _so_ like to be an artist,” said Will, the quick flush
mounting to his temples.

  “You!” exclaimed the gentleman, taking a minute survey of Will’s
nondescript _toute ensemble_, “Do you ever draw?”

  “Sometimes,” replied Will, “when I can get a bit of charcoal, and a
white wall. I was just kicked out of the Chronicle office for doing
it.”

  “Follow me,” said the gentleman, tapping him familiarly on the cheek.

  Will needed no second invitation. Climbing one flight of stairs, he
found himself in a small studio, lined on all sides by pictures; some
finished and framed, others in various stages of progression. Pallets,
brushes, and crayons, lay scattered round an easel; while in one corner
was an artist’s lay figure, which, in the dim light of the apartment,
Will mistook for the artist’s wife, whose presence he respectfully
acknowledged by a profound bow, to the infinite amusement of his patron.

  Mr. Lester was delighted with Will’s naive criticisms on his
pictures, and his profound reverence for art. A few days found him
quite domesticated in his new quarters; and months passed by swift as a
weaver’s shuttle, and found him as happy as a crowned prince; whether
grinding colors for the artist, or watching the progress of his pencil,
or picking up stray crumbs of knowledge from the lips of connoisseurs,
who daily frequented the studio; and many a rough sketch did Will make
in his little corner, that would have made them open their critical
eyes wide with wonder.

       *       *       *       *       *

  “What a foolish match!” Was an engagement ever announced that did
not call forth this remark, from some dissenting lip? Perhaps it _was_
a “foolish match.” Meta had no dower but her beauty, and Will had no
capital but his pallet and easel. The gossips said she “might have
done much better.” There was old Mr. Hill, whose head was snow white,
but whose gold was as yellow and as plenty as Meta’s bright ringlets;
and Mr. Vesey, whose father made a clergyman of him, because he didn’t
know enough to be a merchant; and Lawyer Givens, with his carrotty head
and turn-up nose, and chin that might have been beat; and Falstaff-ian
Captain Reef, who brought home such pretty china shawls and grass cloth
dresses, and who had as many wives as a Grand Turk. Meta might have had
any one of these by hoisting her little finger. Foolish Meta! money and
misery in one scale, poverty and love in the other. Miserable little
Meta! And yet she does not look so _very_ miserable, as she leans over
her husband’s shoulder, and sees the landscape brighten on the canvass,
or presses her rosy lips to his forehead, or arranges the fold of a
curtain for the desired light and shade, or grinds his colors with her
own dainty little fingers; no, she looks anything but miserable with
those soft eyes so full of light, and that elastic step, and voice of
music, that are inspiration to her artist husband. No; she thinks the
“old masters” were fools to her young master, and she already sees the
day when his studio will be crowded with connoisseurs and patrons,
and his pictures bring him both fame and fortune; and then, they will
travel in foreign countries, and sleep under Italia’s soft blue skies,
and see the Swiss glaciers, and the rose-wreathed homes of England,
and the grim old chateaux of France, and perhaps beard old Haynau in
his den. Who knows? Yes; and Will should feast his eyes on beauty, and
they’d be as happy, as if care and sorrow had never dimmed a bright eye
with tears, since the seraph stood, with a flaming sword, to guard the
gate of Eden. Hopeful, happy, trusting Meta! the bird’s carol is not
sweeter than yours;--and yet the archer takes his aim, and with broken
wing it flutters to the ground.

  Yes: Meta was an angel. Will said it a thousand times a day, and his
eyes repeated it when his tongue was silent. Meta’s brow, and cheek,
and lips, and tresses were multiplied indefinitely, in all his female
heads. Her dimpled hand, her round arm, her plump shoulder, her slender
foot, all served him for faultless models.

  Life was so beautiful to him now! his employment so congenial, his
heart so satisfied. It _must be_ that he should succeed. The very
thought of failure--“but then, he _should not_ fail!” Poor Will! he
had yet to learn that garrets are as often the graves as the nurseries
of genius, and that native talent goes unrecognized until stamped
with _foreign_ approbation. Happily--hopefully--heroically he toiled
on; morning’s earliest beam, and day’s last lingering ray finding him
busy at his easel. But, alas! as time passed, though patrons came not,
creditors did; and one year after their marriage, Meta might have been
seen stealthily conveying little parcels back and forth to a small shop
in the neighborhood, where employment was furnished for needy fingers.
It required all her feminine tact and diplomacy to conceal from Will
her little secret, or to hide the tell-tale blush, when he noticed
the disappearance of her wedding ring, which now lay glittering in a
neighboring pawn-broker’s window; yet never for an instant, since the
little wife first slept on Will’s heart, had she one misgiving that she
had placed her happiness unalterably in his keeping.

  Oh, inscrutable womanhood! Pitiful as the heart of God, when the
dark cloud of misfortune, or shame, bows the strong frame of manhood;
merciless--vindictive--implacable as the Prince of Darkness, towards
thy tempted, forsaken and sorrowing sisters!

       *       *       *       *       *

  The quick eye of affection was not long in discovering Meta’s secret;
and now every glance of love, every caress, every endearing tone of
Meta’s, gave Will’s heart a sorrow pang.

  Meta! who had turned a deaf ear to richer lovers, to share _his_
heart and home; Meta! whose beauty might grace a court, whose life
should be all sunshine: that Meta’s bright eyes should dim, her cheek
pale, her step grow prematurely slow and faltering, for him!--the
thought was torture.

       *       *       *       *       *

  “To-morrow, Will--you said to-morrow,” said Meta, hiding her tears
on her husband’s shoulder; “the land of _gold_ is also the land of
_graves_,” and she gazed mournfully into his face.

  “Dear Meta,” said her husband, “do not unman me with your tears; our
parting will be brief, and I shall return to you with gold--gold! Meta;
and you shall yet have a home worthy of you. Bear up, dear Meta--the
sun will surely break through the cloud rift. God bless and keep my
darling wife.”

  Poor little Meta! for hours she sat stupefied with sorrow, in the
same spot where Will had left her. The sun shone cheerfully in at
the little window of her new home, but its beams brought no warmth
to Meta’s heart. The clinging clasp of Will’s arms was still about
her neck: Will’s kiss was still warm upon her lips, and yet--_she was
alone_.

  She thought, with a shudder, of the treacherous sea; of the
pestilence that walketh in darkness; of a sick-bed, on a foreign shore;
of the added bitterness of the death pang, when the eye looks vainly
for the _one loved face_; and bowing her face in her hands, she wept
convulsively.

       *       *       *       *       *

  “Dear heart! Goodness alive!” said Meta’s landlady, peeping in
at the door. “Don’t take on so; bless me, how long have you been
married? you’re nothing better than a child _now_. Why didn’t you go
to Californy with your husband? Where’s your folks?--whose picter is
that? Ah! I see now, it is meant for you. But why didn’t you have on
a gown, dear, instead of being wrapped up in them clouds? It makes
you look like a sperit. Come now, don’t sit moping here; come down
stairs and see me work; it will amuse you like. I’m going to make some
brown bread. I dare say you never made a bit of brown bread in your
life. I put a power of Ingin in mine. I learned that in the country.
I was brought up in the country. I hate city folks; they’ve no more
heart than a sexton; much as ever they can stop frolicking long enough
to bury one another. They’ll sleep, too, like so many tops, while
the very next street is all of a blaze, and their poor destitute
fellow-creatures are turned naked into the streets. They’ll plow right
through a burying ground, if they take a notion, harrowing up dead
folks, and _live_ ones, too, _I_ guess. And as to Sunday--what with
Jews, and Frenchmen, and down Easters, and other foreigners, smoking
and driving through the streets, ’tisn’t any Sunday at all. Well, I
never knew what Sodom meant till I came to the city. Why Lot’s wife
turned round to take a second look at it, is beyond me. Well, if you
won’t come down stairs I must leave you, for I smell my bread burning;
but do cheer up--you look as lonesome as a pigeon on a spout of a rainy
day.”

  A letter from the best beloved! How our eye lingers on the well-known
characters. How we torture the words to extract hidden meanings.
How tenderly we place it near the heart, and under the pillow. How
lingeringly comes the daylight, when our waiting eyes would re-peruse
what is already indelibly written on the heart!

  Will’s voyage had been prosperous--his health was good--his hope
and courage unabated. Meta’s eye sparkled, and her cheek flushed like
a rose, as she pressed the letter again and again to her lips; but,
after all, it was _only_ a letter, and time dragged _so_ heavily.
Meta was weary of sewing, weary of reading, weary of watching endless
pedestrians pass and repass beneath her window, and when _twilight_
came, with its deepening shadows--that hour so sweet to the happy, so
fraught with gloom to the wretched--and Meta’s eye fell upon the little
house opposite, and saw the little parlor lamp gleam like a beacon
light for the absent husband, while the happy wife glided about with
busy hands, and lightsome step, and when, at last, _he_ came, and the
broken circle was complete, poor Meta turned away to weep.

  Joy, Meta, joy! dry your tears! Will has been successful. Will is
coming home. Even now the Sea-Gull plows the waves, with its precious
living freight. Lucky Will! he _has_ “found gold,” but it was dug
from “the mine” of the artist’s brain. Magical Will! the liquid eyes
and graceful limbs of Senor Alvarez’s only daughter are reproduced on
canvas, in all their glowing beauty, by your magic touch! The Senor
is rich--the Senor is liberal--the Senor’s taste is as unimpeachable
as his credit--the Senor has pronounced Will “a genius.” Other Senors
hear it; other Senors have gold in plenty, and dark-eyed, graceful
daughters, whose charms Will perpetuates, and yet _fails to see_, for
_a sweeter face which comes between_.

  Dry your tears, little Meta--smooth the neglected ringlets--don _his_
favorite robe, and listen with a flushed cheek, a beating heart and a
love-lit eye, for the long absent but well remembered footstep.

  Ah! Meta, there _are_ meetings that o’erpay the pain of parting. But,
dear Reader, you and I are _de trop_.

       *       *       *       *       *

  You should have seen how like a little brigand Will looked, with his
bronzed face and fierce beard and mustache--so fierce that Meta was
half afraid to jump into his arms; you should have seen Meta’s new
home to know what a pretty little nest love and taste may weave for a
cherished bird; you should have seen with what a Midas touch Will’s
gold suddenly opened the eyes of people to his wonderful merit, as an
artist; how “patrons” flocked in, now that he lived in a handsome house
in Belgrave Square; how Mr. Jack Punch repented with crocodile tears,
that he had ever kicked him out of “the Chronicle office,” and how Will
immortalized him on canvas, in the very act; not forgetting to give
due prominence, in the foreground, to the figure of his philanthropic
employer, Mr. John Howard, who, in the touching language of his
Prospectus, always made it a point to “exalt virtue, however humble!”




TABITHA TOMPKINS’ SOLILOQUY.


  Have I, Tabitha Tompkins, a right to my share of fresh air
uncontaminated? or have I not? I ask the question with my arms akimbo.
I might as well say what I’ve got to say, popgun fashion, as to tiptoe
round my subject, mincing and curtesying when I’m all ablaze with
indignation.

  I ask again: Have I a right to my share of fresh air uncontaminated?
or have I not?

  Do I go out for a walk? Every man I meet is a locomotive chimney.
Smoke--smoke--smoke--smoke:--great, long tails of it following in
their wake, while I dodge, and twist, and choke, trying to escape the
coils of the stifling anaconda, till I’m black in the face. I, Tabitha
Tompkins, whose grandfather was one of the “signers” of the Declaration
of Independence! I feel seventy-six-y! I have borne it about as long as
I can without damage to hooks and eyes.

  If I try to escape it, by getting into an omnibus, there it is again!
If it does not originate inside, some “gentleman” on the box or top,
wafts it into the windows. If I take refuge in a ferry boat, I find
“gentlemen requested not to smoke,” (as usual) a dead letter,--no more
regarded than is the law against gaming, or the Sunday liquor traffic.
Do I go to a concert at Castle Garden, and step out on the balcony
between the performances for a breath of fresh air?--myriads of lighted
Havannas send me dizzy and staggering back into the concert room. Does
a gentleman call to see me of an evening?--the instant he shakes his
“ambrosial curls,” and gives “a nod,” I have to run for my vinaigrette.

  Do I advertise for lodgings; and after much inspection of rooms, and
wear and tear of patience and gaiter boots, make a final selection?
Do I emigrate with big trunk, and little trunk, and a whole nest of
bandboxes? Do I get my rocking-chair, and work-table, and writing-desk,
and pretty little lamp, all safely transported and longitudinized
to my fancy? Do I, in a paradisaical state of mind, (attendant upon
said successful emigration,) go to my closet, some fine morning, and
take down a pet dress?--asafœtida and onions, what an odor! All the
“pachouli” and “new mown hay” in New York wouldn’t sweeten it. Six
young men the other side of that closet, and all smokers!!! Betty, you
may have that dress;--I wouldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs.

  Do I lend a masculine friend my copy of Alexander Smith’s Poems?--can
I ever touch it again till it has been through quarantine? Does he, by
mistake, carry home my tippet in his pocket after a concert?--can I
compute the hours it must hang dangling on the clothes line, before it
can be allowed to resume its place round my neck?

  Do I go to church on Sunday, with a devout desire to attend to the
sermon?--my next neighbor is a young man, apparently seated on a nettle
cushion: he groans and fidgets, and fidgets and groans; crosses his
feet and uncrosses them; kicks over the cricket; knocks down his cane;
drops the hymn-book, and finally draws from his coat pocket a little
case; takes out one segar after another, transposes them, applies them
to the end of his nose, and pats them affectionately; then he examines
his watch; then frowns at the pulpit; then, glancing at the door, draws
a sigh long enough and strong enough to inflate a pair of bellows, or
burst off a vest button.

[Illustration: “Mr. Stubbs is earnestly requested to call and settle
the above bill at his earliest convenience.”]

  With a dolorous whine, this same young man deplores (in public) his
inability to indulge in the luxury of a wife, “owing to the extravagant
habits of the young ladies of the present day.” I take this occasion
to submit to public inspection a little bit of paper found in the vest
pocket of this fumigated, cork-screwed, pantalooned humbug, by his
washerwoman:

                                          NEW YORK, October 1st, 1853.
  MR. THADDEUS THEOPHILUS STUBBS,
                                       TO JUAN FUMIGO,             Dr.

    To Segars for Sept., 1853
  Sept. 1--To 20 Trabucos, at 5c.                                  $1 00
    “      To 12 Riohondas, at 6d.                                    75
    “   3--To 12 Los Tres Castillos, at 6d.                           75
    “      To 12 La Nicotiana, at 6d.                                 75
    “   4--(Sunday--for Segars for a party) 10 Palmettoes,
           10 Esculapios, 12 La Sultanos, 12 El Crusados,
           20 Norriegos, 16 L’Alhambros, at 4c.                     3 20
    “   6--To 50 L’Ambrosias, at 4c.                                2 00
    “  10--To 30 Cubanos, at 8c.                                    2 40
    “  12--To 50 Londres, at 4c.                                    2 00
    “  15--To 30 Jenny Linds, (for concert party,) at 8c.           2 40
    “  24--To 50 Figaros, (for party to see Uncle Tom, at the
           National,) at 8c.                                        4 00
    “  26--To 100 Mencegaros, (for party of country relations
           and friends,) at 2c.                                     2 00
    “  30--To 40 Imperial Regalias, at 1s.                          5 00
                                                                --------
                                                                  $26 25

          _Received Payment_,
     (Mr. Stubbs is earnestly requested to call and settle the above at
     his earliest convenience. J. F.)

  Consistent Stubbs! But, then, his segar bill is not receipted!




SOLILOQUY OF A HOUSEMAID.


  Oh, dear, dear! Wonder if my mistress _ever_ thinks I am made of
flesh and blood? Five times, within half an hour, I have trotted
up stairs, to hand her things, that were only four feet from her
rocking-chair. Then, there’s her son, Mr. George,--it does seem to me,
that a great able-bodied man like him, needn’t call a poor tired woman
up four pair of stairs to ask “what’s the time of day?” Heigho!--its
“_Sally_ do this,” and “_Sally_ do that,” till I wish I never had been
baptized at all; and I might as well go farther back, while I am about
it, and wish I had never been born.

  Now, instead of ordering me round so like a dray horse, if they would
only look up smiling-like, now and then; or ask me how my “rheumatiz”
did; or say good morning, Sally; or show some sort of interest in a
fellow-cretur, I could pluck up a bit of heart to work for them. A kind
word would ease the wheels of my treadmill amazingly, and wouldn’t cost
_them_ anything, either.

  Look at my clothes, all at sixes and sevens. I can’t get a minute
to sew on a string or button, except at night; and then I’m so sleepy
it is as much as ever I can find the way to bed; and what a bed it
is, to be sure! Why, even the pigs are now and then allowed clean
straw to sleep on; and as to bed-clothes, the less said about them the
better; my old cloak serves for a blanket, and the sheets are as thin
as a charity school soup. Well, well; one wouldn’t think it, to see
all the fine glittering things down in the drawing-room. Master’s span
of horses, and Miss Clara’s diamond ear-rings, and mistresses rich
dresses. I _try_ to think it is all right, but it is no use.

  To-morrow is Sunday--“day of _rest_” I believe they _call_ it.
H-u-m-p-h!--more cooking to be done--more company--more confusion than
on any other day in the week. If I own a soul I have not heard how to
take care of it for many a long day. Wonder if my master and mistress
calculate to pay me for _that_, if I lose it? It is a _question_ in my
mind. Land of Goshen! I aint sure I’ve got a mind--there’s the bell
again!




CRITICS.

       “Bilious wretches, who abuse you because you write better than
     they.”


  Slander and detraction! Even I, Fanny, know better than that.
_I_ never knew an editor to nib his pen with a knife as sharp as
his temper, and write a scathing criticism on a book, because the
authoress had declined contributing to his paper. I never knew a
man who had fitted himself to a promiscuous coat, cut out in merry
mood by taper fingers, to seize his porcupine quill, under the agony
of too tight a _self-inflicted_ fit, to annihilate the offender. I
never saw the bottled-up hatred of years, concentrated in a single
venomous paragraph. I never heard of an unsuccessful masculine author,
whose books were drugs in the literary market, speak with a sneer of
successful literary feminity, and insinuate that it was by _accident_,
not _genius_, that they hit the popular favor!

  By the memory of “seventy-six,” No! Do you suppose a _man’s_ opinions
are in the market--to be bought and sold to the highest bidder? Do you
suppose he would laud a vapid book, because the fashionable authoress
once laved his toadying temples with the baptism of upper-tendom? or,
do you suppose he’d lash a poor, but self-reliant wretch, who had
presumed to climb to the topmost round of Fame’s ladder, without
_his_ royal permission or assistance, and in despite of his repeated
attempts to discourage her? No--no--bless your simple soul; a man never
stoops to a meanness. There never was a criticism yet, born of envy, or
malice, or repulsed love, or disappointed ambition. No--no. Thank the
gods, _I_ have a more exalted opinion of masculinity.




FORGETFUL HUSBANDS.

       “There is a man out west, so forgetful, that his wife has to put
     a wafer on the end of her nose, that he may distinguish her from
     the other ladies; but this does not prevent him from making
     occasional mistakes.”


  Take the wafer off your nose, my dear, and put it on your lips! Keep
silence and let Mr. Johnson go on “making his mistakes;”--you cannot
stop him, if you try; and if he has made up his mind to be near-sighted,
all the guide-boards that you can set up, will only drive him home the
longest way round!

  So trot your babies, smooth your ringlets, digest your dinner,
and--agree to differ! Don’t call Mr. Johnson “my dear,” or he will have
good reason to think you are going to quarrel with him! Look as pretty
as a poppet; put on the dress he used to like--and help him to his
favorite bit at table, with your accustomed grace; taking care not (?)
to touch him, _accidentally_, with your little fat hand, when you are
passing it. Ten to one he is on the marrow bones of his soul to you, in
less than a week, though tortures couldn’t wring a confession out of
him. Then, if he’s worth the trouble, you are to take advantage of his
silent penitence, and go every step of the way to meet him, for he will
not approximate to _you_, the width of a straw! If he has not frittered
away all your love for him, this is easily done, my dear, and for one
whole day after it, he will feel grateful to you for sparing him the
humiliation (?) of making an acknowledgment. How many times, my dear
“Barkis,” you will be “willing” to go through all this, depends upon
several little circumstances in your history with which I am
unacquainted.




SUMMER FRIENDS.

    “If every pain and care we feel
      Could burn upon our brow,
    How many hearts would move to heal,
      That strive to crush us now.”


  Don’t you believe it? They would run from you, as if you had the
plague. “Write your brow” with anything else but your “troubles,” if
you do not wish to be left solus. You have no idea how “good people”
will pity you when you tell your doleful ditty! They will “pray for
you,” give you advice by the bushel, “feel for you”--everywhere
but in their pocket-books; and wind up by telling you to “trust in
Providence;” to all of which you feel very much like replying as the
old lady did when she found herself spinning down hill in a wagon, “I
trusted in Providence till the tackling broke!”

  Now, listen to me;--just go to work and hew out a path for yourself;
get your head above water, and then snap your fingers in their
pharisaical faces! Never ask a favor until you are drawing your last
breath; and never forget one. “Write your troubles on your brow?” That
man was either a knave, or, what is worse, a fool. I suppose he calls
himself a poet; if he does, all I have to say is, it’s high time the
city authorities took away his “license.”




HOW THE WIRES ARE PULLED:

OR,

WHAT PRINTER’S INK WILL DO.


  “Isn’t it extraordinary, Mr. Stubbs, how Mr. Simpkins can always
be dressed in the last tip-top fashion? Don’t you and I, and all the
world know, that old Allen has a mortgage on his house, and that he
never has a dollar by him longer than five minutes at a time. Isn’t it
extraordinary, Mr. Stubbs?”

  “Not at all--not at all--my dear,” said Mr. Stubbs, knocking the
ashes from his Havana; “to an editor all things are possible;” and he
unfolded the damp sheets of the Family Gazette, of which Mr. Simpkins
was editor, and commenced reading aloud the following paragraph:

  “We yesterday had the gratification of visiting the celebrated
establishment of the far-famed Inman & Co., Hatters, No. 172 Wideway.
We pronounce their new style of spring hat, for lightness, beauty,
and durability, to be unrivaled; it is aptly designated the ‘Count
D’Orsay hat.’ The gentlemanly and enterprising proprietors of the
establishment, are unwearied in their endeavors to please the public.
There is a _je ne sais quoi_ about _their_ hats, which can be found
nowhere else in the city.”

  “Well, I don’t see,” said Mrs. Stubbs, “I--”

  “Sh--! sh--! Mrs. Stubbs; don’t interrupt the court--here’s another.”

  “Every one should visit the extensive ware-rooms of Willcut & Co.,
Tailors, 59 Prince Albert street. There is science wagging in the very
tails of Mr. Willcut’s coats; in fact, he may be said to be the only
tailor in the city, who is a thorough _artist_. His pantaloons are
the _knee_-plus-ultra of shear-dom. Mr. Willcut has evidently made
the anatomy of masculinity a study--hence the admirable result. The
most casual observer, on noticing Mr. Willcut’s fine phrenological
developments, would at once negative the possibility of his making a
_faux pas_ on broadcloth.”

  “Keep quiet, Mrs. Stubbs; listen:”

  “The St. Lucifer Hotel is a palatial wonder; whether we consider
the number of acres it covers, the splendor of its marble exterior,
the sumptuousness of its drawing rooms, or the more than Oriental
luxuriousness of its sleeping apartments, the tapestry, mirrors and
gilding of which remind one forcibly of the far-famed Tuileries. The
host of the St. Lucifer is an Apollo in person, a Chesterfield in
manners, and a Lucullus in _taste_; while those white-armed Houris, the
female waiters, lap the soul in Elysium.”

  Mr. Stubbs lifted his spectacles to his forehead, crossed his legs,
and nodded knowingly to Mrs. Stubbs.

  “That’s the way it’s done, Mrs. Stubbs. That last notice paid his
six months’ hotel bill at the St. Lucifer, including wine, cigars,
and other little editorial perquisites. Do you want to know,” said
Stubbs, (resuming the paper,) “how he gets his carriages repaired and
his horses shod for nothing in the village where his country seat is
located? This, now, is a regular stroke of genius. He does it by two
words. In an account of his visit to the Sybil’s Cave, in which he
says, ‘MY FRIEND, the blacksmith, and I soon found the spot,’ &c.,
(bah!) Then here is something that will interest you, my dear, on the
other page of the Gazette. Mr. Simpkins has used up the dictionary in a
half-column announcement of Miss Taffety (the milliner’s) ‘magnificent
opening at ---- street.’ (Of course she made his wife a present of a
new Paris bonnet.”)

  “Well, I never--” said the simple Mrs. Stubbs. “Goodness knows, if
I had known all this before, I would have married an editor myself.
Stubbs, why don’t _you_ set up a newspaper?”

  “M-r-s. S-t-u-b-b-s!” said her husband, in an oracular tone, “to
conduct a newspaper requires a degree of tact, enterprise and ability
to which Jotham Stubbs unfortunately is a stranger. The Family
Gazette or its founder is by no means a fair sample of our honorable
newspapers, and their upright, intelligent, and respected editors.
Great Cæsar!--no!” said Stubbs, rising from his chair, and bringing his
hand down emphatically on his corduroys, “no more than you are a fair
sample of feminine beauty, Mrs. Stubbs!”




WHO WOULD BE THE LAST MAN?

       “Fanny Fern says, ‘If there were but one woman in the world, the
     men would have a terrible time.’ Fanny is right; but we would ask
     her what kind of a time the _women_ would have if there were but
     _one man_ in existence?”


  What kind of a time would they have? Why, of course no grass would
grow under their slippers! The “Wars of the Roses,” the battles of
Waterloo and Bunker Hill would be a farce to it. Black eyes would be
the rage, and both caps and characters would be torn to tatters. I
imagine it would not be much of a millennium, either, to the moving
cause of the disturbance. He would be as crazy as a fly in a drum, or
as dizzy as a bee in a ten-acre lot of honeysuckles, uncertain where to
alight. He’d roll his bewildered eyes from one exquisite organization
to another, and frantically and diplomatically exclaim--“How happy
could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away!”

  “What kind of a time would the women have, were there only one man in
the world?”

  What kind of a time would they have? What is that to _me_? They might
“take their own time,” every “Miss Lucy” of them, for all _I_ should
care; and so might the said man himself; for with me, the limited
supply would not increase the value of the article.




“ONLY A COUSIN.”


  How the rain patters against the windows of your office! How sombre,
and gloomy, and cheerless, it looks there! Your little office-boy looks
more like an imp of darkness than anything else, as he sits crouched in
the corner, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

  You button your overcoat tight to your chin, (cut possible clients,)
and run over to see your cousin Kitty. Ah! that is worth while! A
bright, blazing fire; sofa wheeled up to it, and Kitty sitting there,
looking so charming in her pretty _neglige_. She looks up sweetly and
tranquilly, and says: “Now that’s a good Harry; sit down by me, and be
agreeable.”

  Well, you “sit down,” (just as close as you like, too!) tell her all
the down-town male gossip; consult her confidentially about trimming
your whiskers; and desire her candid, unbiased opinion about the
propriety and feasibility, with the help of some Macassar, of _coaxing
out_ a moustache! Then you make a foray into her work-basket, tangling
spools most unmercifully, and reading over all the choice bits of
poetry that women are so fond of clipping from the newspapers. Then
you both go into the china closet, and she gets you a tempting little
luncheon; and you grow suddenly merry, and have a contest which shall
make the worst pun; you earn for yourself a boxed ear, and are obliged,
in self-defence, to imprison the offending hand; your aunt comes in;
let her come! are not you and Kitty cousins?

  There’s a ring at the door, and Mr. Frank ---- is announced. You say,
“Unmitigated puppy!” and begin a vehement discussion with your aunt,
about anything that comes handy; but that don’t prevent you from seeing
and hearing all that goes on at the other side of the room. Your aunt
is very oblivious, and wouldn’t mind it if you occasionally lost the
thread of your discourse. Kitty is the least bit of a coquette! and her
conversation is very provocative, racy and sparkling; you privately
determine to read her a lecture upon it, as soon as practicable.

  It seems as though Mr. Frank ---- never would go. Upon his exit,
Kitty informs you that she is going to Madame ----’s concert with him.
You look serious, and tell her you “should be very sorry to see a
cousin of yours enter a concert room with such a brainless fop.” Kitty
tosses her curls, pats you on the arm, and says, “_Jealous_, hey?” You
turn on your heel, and, lighting a cigar, bid her “good-morning,” and
for a little eternity of a week you never go near her. Meantime, your
gentlemen friends tell you how “divine” your little cousin looked at
the concert.

  You are in a very bad humor; cigars are no sedative--newspapers
either. You crowd your beaver down over your eyes and start for your
office. On the way you meet Kitty! Hebe! how bright and fresh she
looks! and what an unmitigated brute you’ve been to treat her so! Take
care! she knows what you are thinking about! Women are omniscient in
such matters! So she peeps archly from beneath those long eyelashes,
and says, extending the tip of her little gloved hand--“Want to make
up, Harry?”

  There’s no resisting! That smile leads you, like a will-o’-the-wisp,
anywhere! So you wait upon her home; nobody comes in, not even your
respected aunt; and you never call her “cousin,” after that day; but no
man living ever won such a darling little wife, as Kitty has promised
to be to you, some bright morning.




THE CALM OF DEATH.

    “The moon looks calmly down when man is dying,
        The earth still holds her sway;
    Flowers breathe their perfume, and the wind keeps sighing;
        Naught seems to pause or stay.”


  Clasp the hands meekly over the still breast--they’ve no more work to
do; close the weary eyes--they’ve no more tears to shed; part the damp
locks--there’s no more pain to bear. Closed is the ear alike to Love’s
kind voice, and Calumny’s stinging whisper.

  Oh! if in that stilled heart you have ruthlessly planted a thorn;
if from that pleading eye you have carelessly turned away; if your
loving glance, and kindly word, and clasping hand, have come--_all too
late_--then God forgive you! No frown gathers on the marble brow as you
gaze--no scorn curls the chiselled lip--no flush of wounded feeling
mounts to the blue-veined temples.

  God forgive you! for _your_ feet, too, must shrink appalled
from death’s cold river--your faltering tongue ask, “Can this be
death?”--your fading eye linger lovingly on the sunny earth--your
clammy hand yield its last faint pressure--your sinking pulse give its
last feeble flutter.

  Oh, rapacious grave; yet another victim for thy voiceless keeping!
What! no word or greeting from all thy household sleepers? No warm
welcome from a sister’s loving lips? No throb of pleasure from the dear
maternal bosom?

  _Silent all!_

  Oh, if these broken links were _never_ gathered up! If beyond Death’s
swelling flood there were _no_ eternal shore! If for the struggling
bark there were no port of peace! If athwart that lowering cloud sprang
no bright bow of promise!

    Alas for Love, if _this_ be all,
    And _naught beyond_--oh earth!




MRS. ADOLPHUS SMITH SPORTING THE “BLUE STOCKING.”


[Illustration: “Don’t be disagreeable, Smith, I’m just getting
inspired!”]

  Well, I think I’ll finish that story for the editor of the
“Dutchman.” Let me see; where did I leave off? The setting sun was just
gilding with his last ray--“Ma, I want some bread and molassess”--(yes,
dear,) gilding with his last ray the church spire--“Wife, where’s
my Sunday pants?” (_Under the bed, dear_,) the church spire of
Inverness, when a--“There’s nothing under the bed, dear, but your
lace cap”--(Perhaps they are in the coal hod in the closet,) when
a horseman was seen approaching--“Ma’am, the _pertators_ is out;
not one for dinner”--(Take some turnips,) approaching, covered with
dust, and--“Wife! the baby has swallowed a button”--(_Reverse him_,
dear--take him by the heels,) and waving in his hand a banner, on which
was written--“Ma! I’ve torn my pantaloons”--liberty or death! The
inhabitants rushed _en masse_--“Wife! WILL you leave off scribbling?”
(Don’t be disagreeable, Smith, I’m just getting inspired,) to the
public square, where De Begnis, who had been secretly--“Butcher wants
to see you, ma’am”--secretly informed of the traitors’--“Forgot _which_
you said, ma’am, sausages or mutton chop”--movements, gave orders to
fire; not less than twenty----“My gracious! Smith, you haven’t been
_reversing_ that child all this time; he’s as black as your coat; and
that boy of YOURS has torn up the first sheet of my manuscript. There!
it’s no use for a married woman to cultivate her intellect.----Smith,
hand me those twins.”




CECILE VRAY.

       “Died, in ----, Cecile, wife of Mortimer Vray, artist. This lady
     died in great destitution, among strangers, and was frequently
     heard to say, ‘I wish I were dead!’”


  A brief paragraph, to chronicle a broken heart! Poor Cecile! We
little thought of this, when conning our French tasks, your long raven
ringlets twining lovingly with mine; or, when released from school
drudgery, we sauntered through the fragrant woods, weaving rosy dreams
of a bright future, which neither you nor I were to see.

  I feel again your warm breath upon my cheek--the clasp of your
clinging arms about my neck; and the whispered “Don’t forget me,
Fanny,” from that most musical of voices.

  Time rolled on, and oceans rolled between: then came a rumor of an
“artist lover”--then a “bridal”--now the sad sequel!

  Poor Cecile! Those dark eyes restlessly and vainly looking for some
familiar face on which to rest, ere they closed forever; that listening
ear, tortured by strange footsteps--that fluttering sigh, breathed out
on a strange bosom. Poor Cecile!

  And _he_ (shame to tell) who won that loving heart but to trample it
under foot, basks under Italy’s sunny skies, bound in flowery fetters,
of a foreign syren’s weaving.

  God rest thee, Cecile! Death never chilled a warmer heart; earth
never pillowed a lovelier head; Heaven ne’er welcomed a sweeter spirit.

       *       *       *       *       *

  On foreign shores, from broken dreams, a guilty man shall start, as
thy last sad, plaintive wail rings in his tortured ear, “_Would I were
dead?_”




SAM SMITH’S SOLILOQUY.


  By the beard of the Prophet! what a thing it is to be a bachelor! I
wonder when this table was dusted last! I wonder how long since that
mattress was turned, or that carpet swept, or what was the primeval
color of that ewer and wash-basin.

  Christopher Columbus! how the frost curtains the windows: how
dirge-like the wind moans: how like a great, white pall the snow covers
the ground. Five times I’ve rung that bell for coal, for this rickety
old grate, but I might as well thump for admittance at the gate of
Paradise.

  And speaking of Paradise--Sam Smith, you must be married: you haven’t
a button to your shirt, nor a shirt to your buttons either.

  Wonder if women are such obstinate little monkeys to manage? Wonder
if they must be bribed with a new bonnet every day, to keep the peace?
Wonder if you bring home a friend unexpectedly to dinner, if they
always take to their bed with the sick headache? Wish there was any
way of finding out, but by experience. Well, Sam, you are a Napoleonic
looking fellow: if _you_ can’t manage a woman, who can?

  How I shall pet the little clipper. I’ll marry a blue-eyed woman:
they are the most affectionate. She must not be too tall: a man’s wife
shouldn’t _look down_ upon him. She must not know too much: the Furies
take your pert, catamount-y, scribbling women, with a repartee always
rolled up under their tongues. She mustn’t be over seventeen: but how
to find that out, Sam, is the question: it is about as easy as to make
an editor tell you the truth about his subscription list. She must be
handsome--no she mustn’t either. I should be as jealous as Blue Beard.
All the corkscrew, pantalooned, perfumed popinjays would be ogling
her. But then, again, there’s three hundred and sixty-five days in a
year, and three times a day I must sit opposite that connubial face, at
the table. What’s to be done? Yes; she _must_ be handsome: that is as
certain as that Louis Napoleon has a Jewish horror of _Ham_.

  Wonder if wives are expensive articles? Wonder if their “little
hands were ever made to scratch out husbands’ eyes?” Wonder if Caudle
lectures are “all in your eye,” or--occasionally in your ear? Wonder if
babies invariably prefer the night-time to cry?

  To marry or not to marry, Sam? Whether ’tis better to go buttonless,
and to shiver, or marry and be always in hot water?

  There’s Tom Hillot. Tom’s married. I was his groomsman. I would have
given a small fortune to have been in his white satin vest--what with
the music, and the roses, and the pretty little bridesmaid! Didn’t the
bride look bewitching, with the rose-flush on her cheek and the tear
on her eyelash? And how provokingly happy Tom looked, when he whirled
off with her in the carriage to their new home; and what a pretty
little home it was, to be sure. It is just a year to-day since they
were married. I dined there yesterday. It strikes me that Tom don’t
joke as much as he used in his bachelor days; and then he has a way,
too, of leaving his sentences unfinished. And I noticed that his wife
often touched his foot with her slipper under the table. What do you
suppose she did that for? Just as I was buttoning up my coat to come
away, I asked Tom if he would go to up Tammany Hall with me. He looked
at his wife, and she said, “Oh--_go_ by all means, Mr. Hillot;” when
Tom immediately declined. I don’t understand matrimonial tactics; but
it seems to me he ought to have obliged her.

  Do you know John Jones and his wife? (peculiar name that,--“Jones!”)
Well, they are _another_ happy couple. It is enough to make bachelor
eyes turn green to see them. Mrs. Jones had been four times a widow,
when she married John. She knows the value of husbands. She takes
precious good care of John. Before he goes to the office in the
morning, she pops her head out the window to see if the weathercock
indicates a surtout, spencer, cloak, or Tom and Jerry; this point
settled, she follows him to the door, and calls him back to close
his thorax button “for fear of quinsy.” Does a shower come up in the
forenoon? She sends him clogs, India-rubbers, an extra flannel shirt,
and an oilcloth overall, and prepares two quarts of boiling ginger tea
to administer on his arrival, to prevent the damp from “striking in.”
If he helps himself to a second bit of turkey, she immediately removes
it from his plate, and applying a pocket handkerchief to her eyes,
asks him “if he has the heart to make her for the fifth time a widow?”
You can see, with half an eye, that John must be the happiest dog
alive. I’d like to see the miscreant who dares to say he is not!

  Certainly--matrimony is an invention of----. Well, no matter who
invented it. I’m going to try it. Where’s my blue coat with the bright,
brass buttons? The woman has yet to be born who can resist that; and my
buff vest and neck-tie, too: may I be shot if I don’t offer them both
to the little Widow Pardiggle this very night. “Pardiggle!” Phœbus!
what a name for such a rose-bud. I’ll re-christen her by the euphonious
name of Smith. She’ll _have_ me, of course. She wants a husband--I want
a wife: there’s one point already in which we perfectly agree. I hate
preliminaries. I suppose it is unnecessary for me to begin with the
amatory alphabet. With a widow, I suppose you can skip the rudiments.
Say what you’ve got to say in a fraction of a second. Women grow as
mischievous as Satan if they think you are afraid of them. Do _I_ look
as if _I_ were afraid? Just examine the growth of my whiskers. The
Bearded Lady couldn’t hold a candle to them, (though I wonder she don’t
to her own.) _Afraid?_ h-m-m! I feel as if I could conquer Asia. What
the mischief ails this cravat? It must be the cold that makes my hand
tremble so: there--that’ll do: that’s quite an inspiration. Brummel
himself couldn’t go beyond that. Now for the widow; bless her little
round face! I’m immensely obliged to old Pardiggle for giving her a
quit claim. I’ll make her as happy as a little robin. Do you think
I’d bring a tear into her lovely blue eye? Do you think I’d sit after
tea, with my back to her, and my feet upon the mantel, staring up
chimney for three hours together? Do you think I’d leave her blessed
little side, to dangle round oyster-saloons and theatres? Do I _look_
like a man to let a woman flatten her pretty little nose against the
window-pane night after night, trying to see me reel up street? _No._
Mr. and Mrs. Adam were not more beautified in their nuptial-bower, than
I shall be with the Widow Pardiggle.

       *       *       *       *       *

  _Re_fused by a widow! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well; there’s
one comfort: nobody’ll ever believe it. She is not so very pretty after
all: her eyes are too small, and her hands are rough and red-dy:--not
so very _ready_ either, confound the gipsy. What amazing pretty
shoulders she has! Well, who cares?

    “If she be not fair for me,
    What care I how fair she be?”

Ten to one, she’d have set up that wretch of a Pardiggle
for my model. Who wants to be Pardiggle 2nd? I am glad she didn’t have
me. I mean--I’m glad I didn’t have _her_!




LOVE AND DUTY.


  The moon looked down upon no fairer sight than Effie May, as she
lay sleeping on her little couch, that fair summer night. So thought
her mother, as she glided gently in, to give her a silent, good-night
blessing. The bright flush of youth, and hope was on her cheek. Her
long dark hair lay in masses about her neck and shoulders; a smile
played upon the red lips, and the mother bent low to catch the
indistinct murmur. She starts, at the whispered name, as if a serpent
had stung her; and as the little snowy hand is tossed restlessly upon
the coverlid, she sees, glittering in the moonbeams, on that childish
finger, the golden signet of betrothal. Sleep sought in vain to woo
the eyes of the mother that night. Reproachfully she asked herself,
“How could I have been so blind? (but then Effie has seemed to me only
a child!) But he! oh, no; the _wine-cup_ will be my child’s rival;
it must not be.” Effie was wilful, and Mrs. May knew she must be
cautiously dealt with; but she knew, also, that no mother need despair,
who possesses the affection of her child.

  Effie’s violet eyes opened to greet the first ray of the morning
sun, as he peeped into her room. She stood at the little mirror,
gathering up, with those small hands, the rich tresses so impatient of
confinement. How could she fail to know that she was fair?--she read
it in every face she met; but there was _one_ (and she was hastening
to meet him) whose eye had noted, with a lover’s pride, every shining
ringlet, and azure vein, and flitting blush; his words were soft and
low, and skillfully chosen, and sweeter than music to her ear; and so
she tied, with a careless grace, the little straw hat under her dimpled
chin; and fresh, and sweet, and guileless, as the daisy that bent
beneath her foot, she tripped lightly on to the old trysting place by
the willows.

  Stay! a hand is laid lightly upon her arm, and the pleading voice of
a mother arrests that springing step.

  “Effie dear, sit down with me on this old garden seat; give up your
walk for this morning; I slept but indifferently last night, and
morning finds me languid and depressed.”

  A shadow passed over Effie’s face; the little cherry lips pouted,
and a rebellious feeling was busy at her heart; but one look in her
mother’s pale face decided her, and, untying the strings of her hat,
she leaned her head caressingly upon her mother’s shoulder.

  “You are ill, dear mother; you are _troubled_;” and she looked
inquiringly up into her face.

  “Listen to me, Effie, I have a story to tell you of myself: When I
was about your age, I formed an acquaintance with a young man, by the
name of Adolph. He had been but a short time in the village, but long
enough to win the hearts of half the young girls, from their rustic
admirers. Handsome, frank and social, he found himself everywhere a
favorite. He would sit by me for hours, reading our favorite authors;
and side by side, we rambled through all the lovely paths with which
our village abounded. My parents knew nothing to his disadvantage,
and were equally charmed as myself with his cultivated refinement of
manner, and the indefinable interest with which he invested every
topic, grave or gay, which it suited his mood to discuss. Before I knew
it, my heart was no longer in my own keeping. One afternoon, he called
to accompany me upon a little excursion, we had planned together. As he
came up the gravel walk, I noticed that his fine hair was in disorder:
a pang, keen as death, shot through my heart, when he approached
me, with reeling, unsteady step, and stammering tongue. I could not
speak. The chill of death gathered round my heart. I fainted. When I
recovered, he was gone, and my mother’s face was bending over me, moist
with tears. Her woman’s heart knew all that was passing in mine. She
pressed her lips to my forehead, and only said, ‘God strengthen you to
choose the right, my child.’

  “I could not look upon her sorrowful eyes, or the pleading face of
my gray-haired father, and trust myself again to the witchery of that
voice and smile. A letter came to me; I dared not read it. (Alas! my
heart pleaded too eloquently, even then, for his return.) I returned
it unopened; my father and mother devoted themselves to lighten the
load that lay upon my heart; but the perfume of a flower, a remembered
strain of music, a struggling moonbeam, would bring back old memories,
with a crushing bitterness that swept all before it for the moment.
But my father’s aged hand lingered on my head with a blessing, and my
mother’s voice had the sweetness of an angel’s, as it fell upon my ear!

  “Time passed on, and I had conquered myself. Your father saw me, and
proposed for my hand; my parents left me free to choose, and Effie
dear, _are we not happy_?”

  “Oh, mother,” said Effie, (then looking sorrowfully in her face,)
“did you _never_ see Adolph again?”

  “Do you remember, my child, the summer evening we sat upon the
piazza, when a dusty, travel-stained man came up the steps, and begged
for ‘a supper?’ Do you recollect his bloated, disfigured face? Effie,
_that was Adolph_!”

  “Not that _wreck_ of a _man_, mother?” said Effie, (covering her eyes
with her hands, as if to shut him out from her sight.)

  “Yes; that was all that remained of that glorious intellect, and that
form made after God’s own image. I looked around upon my happy home,
then upon your noble father--then--upon _him_, and,” (taking Effie’s
little hand and pointing to the _ring_ that encircled it,) “in _your_
ear, my daughter, I now breathe my mother’s prayer for me--‘_God help
you to choose the right!_’”

  The bright head of Effie sank upon her mother’s breast, and with a
gush of tears she drew the golden circlet from her finger, and placed
it in her mother’s hand.

  “God bless you, my child,” said the happy mother, as she led her back
to their quiet home.




A FALSE PROVERB.


  I wonder who but the “father of lies,” originated this proverb, “Help
yourself and then everybody else will help you.” Is it not as true as
the book of Job that it’s just driving the nails into your own coffin,
to let anybody know you want help! Is not a “seedy” hat, a threadbare
coat, or patched dress, an effectual shower-bath on old friendships?
Have not people a mortal horror of a sad face and a pitiful story?
Don’t they on hearing it, instinctively poke their purses into the
farthest, most remote corner of their pockets? Don’t they rap their
warm garments round their well-fed persons, and advise you, in a
saintly tone, “to trust in Providence?” Are they not always “engaged”
ever after, when you call to see them? Are they not near-sighted when
you meet them in the street?--and don’t they turn short corners to get
out of your way? “Help yourself,”--of course you will, (if you have
any spirit;)--but when sickness comes, or dark days, and your wits and
nerves are both exhausted, don’t place any dependence on this lying
proverb!--or you will find yourself decidedly humbugged. And then,
when your heart is so soft that anybody could knock you down with a
feather, get into the darkest hole you can find, and cry it out! Then
crawl out, bathe your eyes till they shine again, and if you have
one nice garment left, out with it, put it on! turn your shawl on the
brightest side; put your best and prettiest foot foremost; tie on your
go-to-meetin’ bonnet, and smile under it, if it half kills you; and see
how complaisant the world will be when--you ask nothing of it!

  But if (as there are exceptions to all rules,) you should chance
to stumble upon a true friend (when you can only render thanks as an
equivalent for kindness) “make a note on’t,” as “Captain Cuttle” says,
for it don’t happen but once in a life-time!




A MODEL HUSBAND.

       “Mrs. Perry, a young Bloomer, has eloped from Monson,
     Massachusetts, with Levins Clough. When her husband found she was
     determined to go, he gave her one hundred dollars to start with.”


  Magnanimous Perry! Had I been your spouse, I should have handed that
“one hundred dollar bill” to Mr. Levins Clough, as a healing plaster
for his disappointed affections--encircled your neck with my repentant
arms, and returned to your home. Then, I’d mend every rip in your coat,
gloves, vest, pants, and stockings, from that remorseful hour, till the
millennial day. I’d hand you your cigar-case and slippers, put away
your cane, hang up your coat and hat, trim your beard and whiskers, and
wink at your sherry cobblers, whisky punches, and mint juleps. I’d help
you get a “ten strike” at ninepins. I’d give you a “night key,” and be
perfectly oblivious what time in the small hours you tumbled into the
front entry. I’d pet all your stupid relatives, and help your country
friends to “beat down” the city shopkeepers. I’d frown at all offers of
“pin money.” I’d let you “smoke” in my face till I was as brown as a
herring, and my eyes looked as if they were bound with pink tape; and
I’d invite that pretty widow Delilah Wilkins to dinner, and run out to
do some shopping, and stay away till tea-time. Why! there’s nothing I
_wouldn’t_ do for you--you might have knocked me down with a feather,
after such a piece of magnanimity. That “Levins Clough” could stand no
more chance than a woodpecker tapping at an iceberg.




HOW IS IT?

       “Well, Susan, what do you think of married ladies being happy?”
     “Why I think there are more AIN’T than IS, than IS that AIN’T.”


  Susan, I shall apply to the Legislature to have your name changed to
“Sapphira.” You are an unprincipled female.

  Just imagine yourself MRS. Snip. It is a little prefix not to be
sneezed at. It is only the privileged few, who can secure a pair of
corduroys to mend, and trot by the side of; or a pair of coat-flaps
alternately to darn, and hang on to, amid the vicissitudes of this
patchwork existence.

  Think of the high price of fuel, Susan, and the quantity it takes to
warm a low-spirited, single woman; and then think of having all that
found for you by your husband, and no extra charge for “_gas_.” Think
how pleasant to go to the closet and find a great boot-jack on your
best bonnet; or “to work your passage” to the looking-glass, every
morning, through a sea of dickeys, vests, coats, continuations, and
neck-ties; think of your nicely-polished toilette table spotted all
over with shaving suds; think of your “Guide to Young Women,” used for
a razor strap. Think of Mr. Snip’s lips being hermetically sealed, day
after day, except to ask you “if the coal was out, or if his coat
was mended.” Think of coming up from the kitchen, in a gasping state
of exhaustion, after making a batch of his favorite pies, and finding
five or six great dropsical bags disemboweled on your chamber floor,
from the contents of which Mr. Snip had selected the “pieces” of your
best silk gown, for “rags” to clean his gun with. Think of his taking
a watch-guard you made him out of YOUR HAIR, for a dog-collar! Think
of your promenading the floor, night after night, with your fretful,
ailing baby hushed up to your warm cheek, lest it should disturb your
husband’s slumbers; and think of his coming home the next day, and
telling you, when you were exhausted with your vigils, “that he had
just met his old love, Lilly Grey, looking as fresh as a daisy, and
that it was unaccountable how much older you looked than she, although
you were both the same age.”

Think of all that, Susan.




A MORNING RAMBLE.


  What a lovely morning! It is a luxury to breathe. How blue the sky;
how soft the air; how fragrant the fresh spring grass and budding
trees; and with what a gush of melody that little bird eases his
joy-burdened heart.

    “This world is very lovely. Oh my God,
    I thank Thee, that I live.”

  Clouds there are; but, oh, how much of sunshine! Sorrow there is;
but, in every cup is mingled a drop of balm. Over our threshold the
destroying angel passeth; yet, ere the rush of his dark wing sweepeth
past, cometh the Healer.

  --Here is a poor, blind man basking in the sunshine, silently
appealing, with outstretched palm, to the passer-by. Through his thin,
gray locks the wind plays lovingly. A smile beams on his withered face;
for, though his eyes are rayless, he can _feel_ that chill Winter has
gone; and he knows that the flowers are blossoming,--for the sweet
West wind cometh, God-commissioned, to waft him their fragrance. Some
pedestrians gaze curiously at him: others, like the Levite, “pass by on
the other side.” A woman approaches. She is plainly clad, and bears a
basket on her arm. She has a good, kind, motherly face, as if she were
hastening back to some humble home, made brighter and happier by her
presence. Life is sweet to her. She catches sight of the poor old man;
her eye falls upon the label affixed to his breast: “I am blind!” Oh,
what if the brightness and beauty of this glad sunshine were all night,
to her vailed lids? What if the dear home faces were forever shrouded
from her yearning sight? What if _she_ might never walk the sunny
earth, without a guiding hand? She places her basket upon the sidewalk,
and wipes away a tear: now she explores her time-worn pocket; finds the
hardly-earned coin, and placing it in the palm of the old man, _presses
his hand lovingly_, and is gone!

  Poor Bartimeus! He may never see the honest face that bent so
tenderly over him; but, to his heart’s core, he felt that kindly
pressure, and the sunshine is all the brighter, and the breeze sweeter
and fresher for that friendly grasp, and life is again bright to the
poor blind man.

   “Oh God! I thank Thee, that I live!”

       *       *       *       *       *

  How swiftly the ferry boat plows through the wave! How gleefully that
little child claps its tiny hands, as the snowy foam parts on either
side, then dashes away like a thing of life. Here are weary business
men, going back to their quiet homes; and pleasure-loving belles,
returning from the city. Pacing up and down the deck, is a worn and
weary woman, bearing in her arms a child, so emaciated, so attenuated,
that but for the restless glance of its dark, sunken eyes, one would
think it a little corpse. The mother has left her unhealthy garret in
the noisome lane of the teeming city, and paid her last penny to the
ferryman, that the health-laden sea breeze may fan the sick child’s
temples. Tenderly she moves it from one shoulder to another. Now, she
lays its little cheek to hers; now, she kisses the little slender
fingers; but still the baby moans. The boat touches the pier. All are
leaving, but the mother and child; the ferryman tells her to “go too.”
She says timidly, “I want to return again--I live the other side--I
came on board for the baby,” (pointing to the dying child.) Poor woman,
she did not know that she could not go back without another fee, and
she has not a penny. Loathsome as is her distant home, she must go back
to it; but how?

  One passenger beside herself still lingers listening. Dainty fingers
drop a coin into the gruff ferryman’s hand,--then a handful into the
weary, troubled mother’s. The sickly babe looks up and smiles at
the chinking coin--the mother smiles, because the baby has smiled
again--and then weeps because she knows not how to thank the lovely
donor.

  “Homeward bound.”

  Over the blue waters, the golden sunset gleams; tinting the snowy,
billowy foam with a thousand iris hues; while at the boat’s prow,
stands the happy mother, wooing the cool sunset breeze, which kisses
soothingly the sick infant’s temples.

    “This earth is very lovely. Oh my God,
    I thank thee that I live!”




HOUR-GLASS THOUGHTS.


  The bride stands waiting at the altar; the corpse lies waiting for
burial.

  Love vainly implores of Death a reprieve; Despair vainly invokes his
coming.

  The starving wretch, who purloins a crust, trembles in the hall of
Justice; liveried sin, unpunished, riots in high places.

  Brothers, clad “in purple and fine linen, fare sumptuously every
day;” Sisters, in linsey-woolsey, toil in garrets and shrink,
trembling, from insults that no fraternal arm avenges.

  The Village Squire sows, reaps and garners golden harvests; the
Parish Clergyman sighs, as his casting vote cuts down his already
meager salary.

  The unpaid sempstress be-gems with tears the fairy festal robe; proud
beauty floats in it through the ball-room, like a thing of air.

  Church spires point, with tapering fingers, to the rich man’s heaven;
Penitence, in rags, tearful and altarless, meekly stays its timid foot
at the threshold.

  Sneaking Vice, wrapped in the labeled cloak of Piety, finds “open
sesame;” shrinking Conscientiousness, jostled rudely aside, weeps in
secret its fancied unworthiness.

  The Editor grows plethoric on the applause of the public and mammoth
subscription lists; the _unrecognized_ journalist, who, behind the
scenes, mixes so deftly the newspaperial salad, lives on the smallest
possible stipend, and looks like an undertaker’s walking advertisement.

  The Wife, pure, patient, loving, trustful, sits singing, by the
evening fire, repairing, with the busy fingers of economy, the
time-worn garment; the Husband, favored by darkness, seeks, with
stealthy steps and costly gifts, the syren of the hour, squandering
hundreds to win a smile which is ever in the market for the highest
bidder.

  The polluted libertine, with foul lips, hackneyed heart, but polished
manners, finds smiling welcome at the beauteous lips of Virtue;
while, from the brow on which that libertine has ineffaceably written
“Magdalen,” “beauteous Virtue” turns scornfully away.

  Wives rant of their “Woman’s Rights,” in public; Husbands eat bad
dinners and tend crying babies, at home.

  Mothers toil in kitchens; Daughters lounge in parlors.

  Fathers drive the plough; Sons drive tandem.




BOARDING HOUSE EXPERIENCE.


  Mr. Ralph Renoux lived by his wits: i. e., he kept a boarding-house;
_taking in_ any number of ladies and gentlemen, who, in the
philanthropic language of his advertisement, “pined for the comforts
and elegancies of a home.”

  Mr. Renoux’s house was at the court-end of the city; his drawing-room
was unexceptionably furnished, and himself, when “made up,” after
ten o’clock in the morning, quite _comme il faut_. Mrs. Renoux never
appeared; being, in the pathetic words of Mr. Renoux, “in a drooping,
invalid state:” nevertheless, she might be seen, by the initiated,
haunting the back stairs and entries, and with flying cap-strings,
superintending kitchen-cabinet affairs.

  Mrs. Renoux was the unhappy mother of three unmarried daughters,
with red hair, and tempers to match; who languished over Byron, in
elegant _negligées_, of a morning, till after the last masculine had
departed; then, in curl-papers and calico long-shorts, performed, for
the absentees, the duty of chambermaids; peeping into valises, trunks,
bureaus, cigar boxes and coat pockets, and replenishing their perfumed
bottles, from the gentlemen’s toilet stands, with the most perfect
_nonchalance_. At dinner, they emerged from their chrysalis state, into
the most butterfly gorgeousness, and exchanged the cracked treble, with
which they had been ordering round the over-tasked maid-of-all-work, as
they affectionately addressed “Papa.”

       *       *       *       *       *

  At the commencement of my story, Renoux was as happy as a kitten
with its first mouse--having entrapped, with the bait of his alluring
advertisement, a widow lady with one child. “The comforts and
elegancies of a home;”--it was just what the lady was seeking:--how
very fortunate!

  “Certainly, Madam,” said Renoux, doubling himself into the form of
the letter C. “I will serve your meals in your own room, if you prefer;
but, really, Madam, I trust you will sometimes grace the drawing-room
with your presence, as we have a very select little family of boarders.
Do you choose to breakfast at eight, nine, or ten, Madam? Do you
incline to Mocha? or prefer the leaves of the Celestial city? Are you
fond of eggs, Madam? Would you prefer to dine at four, or five? Do you
wish six courses, or more? There is the bell-rope, Madam. I trust you
will use it unsparingly, should any thing be omitted or neglected. I
am just on my way down town, and if you will favor me by saying what
you would fancy for your dinner to-day, (the market is full of every
thing--fish, flesh, fowl and game of all sorts,) you have only to
express a wish, Madam, and the thing is here; I should be miserable,
indeed, were the request of a _lady_ to be disregarded in _my_ house,
and that lady deprived of her natural protector. Which is it, Madam,
fish? flesh? or fowl? Any letters to send to the post-office, Madam?
Any commands any where? I shall be _too_ happy to be of service”;--and
bending to the tips of his patent leather toes, Mr. Renoux, facing the
lady, bowed obsequiously and Terpsichore-ally out of the apartment.

  The dinner hour came. An Irish servant-girl came with it; and drawing
out a table at an Irish angle upon the floor, tossed over it a tumbled
table-cloth; placed upon it a castor, minus one leg, some cracked
salt-cellars and tumblers; then laid some knives, left-handed, about
the table; then, withdrew, to reappear with the result of Mr. Renoux’s
laborious research “in the market filled with every thing,” viz: a
consumptive looking mackerel, whose skin clung tenaciously to its back
bone, and a Peter Schemel looking chicken, which, in its life-time,
must have had a vivid recollection of Noah and the forty days’ shower.
This was followed by a dessert of stale baker’s tarts, compounded of
lard and dried apples; and twenty-four purple grapes.

       *       *       *       *       *

  The next morning, Mr. Renoux tip-toed in, smirking and bowing, as
if the bill of fare had been the most sumptuous in the world, and
expressed the greatest astonishment and indignation, that “the stupid
servant had neglected bringing up the other courses which he had
provided;” then he inquired “how the lady had rested;” and when she
preferred a request for another pillow, (there being only six feathers
in the one she had,) he assured her that it should be in her apartment
in less than one hour. A fortnight after, he expressed the most intense
disgust, that “the rascally upholsterer” had not yet sent _what he
had never ordered_. Each morning, Mr. Renoux presented himself, at a
certain hour, behind a very stiff dickey, and offered the lady the
morning papers. Seating himself on the sofa, he would remark that--it
was a very fine day, and that affairs in France appeared to be _in
statu quo_; or, that the Czar had ordered his generals to occupy the
principalities; that Gorchakoff was preparing to cross the Danube;
that the Sultan had dispatched Omar Pasha to the frontiers; that the
latter gentleman had presented his card to Gorchakoff, on the point of
a yataghan, which courtesy would probably lead to----something else!

  During one of these agreeable calls, the lady took occasion slightly
to object to Betty’s nibbling the tarts, as she brought them up for
dinner; whereupon, Mr. Renoux declared, upon the honor of a Frenchman,
that “she should be pitched out of the door immediately, if not sooner;
and an efficient servant engaged to take her place.”

  The next day, the “efficient servant” came in, broom in hand,
whistling “Oh, Susanna,” and passing into the little dressing-room,
to “put it to rights,” amused herself by trying on the widow’s best
bonnet, and polishing her teeth and combing her hair with that lady’s
immaculate and individual head-brush and tooth-brush. You will not be
surprised to learn, that their injured and long-suffering owner, took a
frantic and “French leave” the following morning, in company with her
big and little band-boxes; taking refuge under the sheltering roof of
Madame Finfillan.

       *       *       *       *       *

  Madame Finfillan was a California widow; petite, plump and
pretty--who bore her cruel bereavement with feminine philosophy, and
slid round the world’s rough angles with a most eel-like dexterity.
In short, she was a Renoux in petticoats. Madame welcomed the widow
with great pleasure, because, as she said, she “wished to fill her
house only with first-class boarders;” and the widow might be assured
that she had the apartments fresh from the diplomatic hands of the
Spanish Consul, who would on no account have given them up, had not his
failing health demanded a trip to the Continent. Madame also assured
the widow, that, (although she said it herself,) every part of her
house would bear the closest inspection; that those vulgar horrors,
cooking butter, and diluted tea, were never seen on her Epicurean
table; that they breakfasted at ten, lunched at two, dined at six, and
enjoyed themselves in the _interim_; that her daughter, Miss Clara,
was perfectly well qualified to superintend, when business called her
mother away. And that nobody knew, (wringing her little white hands,)
how _much_ business she had to do, what with trotting round to those
odious markets, trading for wood and coal, and such like uninteresting
things; or what _would_ become of her, had she not some of the best
friends in the world to look after her, in the absence of Mons.
Finfillan.

  --Madame then caught up the widow’s little boy, and, half smothering
him with kisses, declared that there was nothing on earth she loved so
well as children; that there were half a dozen of them in the house,
who loved her better than their own fathers and mothers, and that their
devotion to her was at times quite touching--(and here she drew out an
embroidered pocket handkerchief, and indulged in an interesting little
sniffle behind its cambric folds.) Recovering herself, she went on
to say, that the manner in which some boarding-house keepers treated
children, was perfectly inhuman: that she had a second table for them,
to be sure, but it was loaded with delicacies, and that she always
put them up a little school lunch herself; on which occasion there
was always an amicable little quarrel among them, as to which should
receive from her the greatest number of kisses; also, that it was her
frequent practice to get up little parties and tableaux, for their
amusement. “But here is my daughter, Miss Clara,” said she, introducing
a fair-haired young damsel, buttoned up in a black velvet jacket, over
a flounced skirt.

  “Just sixteen yesterday,” said Madame: “naughty little blossom,
budding out so fast, and pushing her poor mamma off the stage;” (and
here Madame paused for a compliment, and looking in the opposite
mirror, smoothed her jetty ringlets complacently.) “Yes, every
morning little blossom’s mamma looks in the glass, expecting to find
a horror of a gray hair. But what makes my little pet so pensive
to-day?--thinking of her little lover, hey? Has the naughty little
thing a thought she does not share with mamma? But, dear me!”--and
Madame drew out a little dwarf watch; “I had quite forgotten it is the
hour Mons. Guigen gives me my guitar lesson. Adieu, dinner at six,
remember;”--and Madame tripped, coquettishly, out of the room.

  Yes; “dinner at six.” Gold salt-cellars, black waiters, and
finger-bowls; satin chairs in the parlor, and pastilles burning on
the side-table; but the sheets on the beds all torn to ribbons; the
boarders allowed but one towel a week; every bell-rope divorced from
its bell; the locks all out of order on the chamber doors; the “dear
children’s” bill of fare at the “second table”--sour bread, watery
soup, and cold buckwheat cakes;--and “dinner at six,” only an invention
of the enemy, to save the expense of one meal a day--the good, cozy,
old-fashioned tea.

  Well, the boarders were all “trusteed” by Madame’s butcher, baker
and milkman; Miss Clara eloped with the widow’s diamond ring and Mons.
Peneke; and Madame, who had heard that Mons. Finfillan was “among the
things that _were_,” was just about running off with Mons. Guigen,
when her liege lord suddenly returned from California, with damaged
constitution and morals, a dilapidated wardrobe and empty coffers.

  Moral. Beware of boarding-houses: in the words of Shakspeare,

    Let those keep house who ne’er kept house before
    And those who have kept house, keep house the more.




A GRUMBLE FROM THE (H)ALTAR.


  This is the second day I’ve come home to dinner, without that yard of
pink ribbon for Mrs. Pendennis. Now, we shall have a _broil_, not down
in the bill of fare. Julius Cæsar; if she only knew how much I have
to do; but it would make no difference if she did. I used to think a
fool was easily managed. Mrs. Pendennis has convinced me that _that_
was a mistake. If I try to reason with her, she talks round and round
in a circle, like a kitten chasing its tail. If I set my arms a-kimbo,
and look threatening, she settles into a fit of the sulks, to which a
November drizzle of a fortnight’s duration is a millenium. If I try
to get round her by petting, she is as impudent as the----. Yes, just
about. Jerusalem! what a thing it is to be married! And yet, if an
inscrutable Providence should bereave me of Mrs. Pendennis, I am not at
all sure----good gracious, here she comes! Do you know I’d rather face
one of Colt’s revolvers this minute, than that four feet of womanhood?
Isn’t it astonishing, the way they do it?




A WICK-ED PARAGRAPH.

       CONNUBIAL.--Mr. Albert Wicks, of Coventry, under date of December
     28th, advertised his wife as having left his bed and board; and
     now, under date of March 26th, he appends to his former notice, the
     following:

       “Mrs. Wicks, if you ever intend to come back and live with me any
     more, you must come now or not at all.

       “I love you as I do my life, and if you will come now, I will
     forgive you for all you have done and threatened to do, which I
     can prove by three good witnesses: and if not, I shall attend to
     your case without delay, and soon, too.”


  There, now, Mrs. Wicks, what is to be done? “Three good witnesses!”
think of _that_! What the mischief have you been about? Whatever it is,
Mr. Wicks is ready to “love you like his life.” Consistent Mr. Wicks!

  Now take a little advice, my dear innocent, and don’t allow yourself
to be badgered or frightened into anything. None but a coward ever
threatens a woman. Put that in your memorandum book. It’s all bluster
and braggadocio. Thread your darning-needle, and tell him you are ready
for him--ready for anything except his “loving you like his life;” that
you could not possibly survive that infliction, without having your
“wick” snuffed entirely out.

  Sew away, just as if there were not a domestic earthquake brewing
under your connubial feet. If it sends you up in the air, it sends
him, too--there’s a pair of you! Put _that_ in his Wick-ed ear! Of
course he will sputter away, as if he had swallowed a “Roman candle,”
and you can take a nap till he gets through, and then offer him your
smelling-bottle to quiet his nerves.

  That’s the way to quench him!




MISTAKEN PHILANTHROPY.

       “Don’t moralize to a man who is on his back. Help him up, set him
     firmly on his feet, and then give him advice and means.”


  There’s an old-fashioned, verdant piece of wisdom, altogether
unsuited for the enlightened age we live in! Fished up, probably, from
some musty old newspaper, edited by some eccentric man troubled with
that inconvenient appendage, called a heart! Don’t pay any attention
to it. If a poor wretch (male or female) comes to you for charity,
whether allied to you by your own mother, or mother Eve, put on the
most stoical, “get thee behind me” expression you can muster. Listen to
him with the air of a man who “thanks God he is not as other men are.”
If the story carry conviction with it, and truth and sorrow go hand in
hand, button your coat up tighter over your pocket-book, and give him
a piece of--good advice! If you know anything about him, try to rake
up some imprudence or mistake he may have made in the course of his
life, and bring that up as a reason why you can’t give him anything
more substantial, and tell him that his present condition is probably a
salutary discipline for those same peccadilloes! Ask him more questions
than there are in the Assembly’s Catechism, about his private history,
and when you’ve pumped him high and dry, try to teach him (on an empty
stomach,) the “duty of submission.” If the tear of wounded sensibility
begin to flood the eye, and a hopeless look of discouragement settle
down upon the face, “wish him well,” and turn your back upon him as
quick as possible.

  Should you at any time be seized with an unexpected spasm of
generosity, and make up your mind to bestow some worn out, old garment
that will hardly hold together till the recipient gets it home, you’ve
bought him, body and soul; of course you are entitled to the gratitude
of a life-time! If he ever presumes to think differently from you after
that, he’s an “ungrateful wretch,” and “ought to suffer.” As to the
“golden rule,” that was made in old times; everything is changed now;
’taint suited to our meridian.

  People shouldn’t get poor; if they do, you don’t want to be bothered
with it. It’s disagreeable; it hinders your digestion. You’d rather see
Dives than Lazarus; and it’s my opinion your taste will be gratified in
that particular, (in the other world, if it is not in this!)




INSIGNIFICANT LOVE.

       “You, young, loving creature, who dream of your lover by night
     and by day--you fancy that he does the same of you? One hour,
     perhaps, your presence has captivated him, subdued him even to
     weakness; the next, he will be in the world, working his way as a
     man among men, forgetting, for the time being, your very existence.
     Possibly, if you saw him, his outer self, so hard and stern,
     so different from the self you know, would strike you with pain.
     Or else his inner and diviner self, higher than you dream of,
     would turn coldly from _your insignificant love_.”


  “Insignificant love!!” I like that. More especially when out of ten
couple you meet, nine of the wives are as far above their husbands, in
point of mind, as the stars are above the earth. For the credit of the
men I should be sorry to say how many of them would be minus coats,
hats, pantaloons, cigars, &c., were it not for their wives’ earnings;
or how many smart speeches and able sermons have been concocted by
their better halves, (while rocking the cradle,) to be delivered to the
public at the proper time, parrot fashion, by the lords of creation.
Wisdom will die with the men, there’s no gainsaying that!

  Catch a smart, talented, energetic woman, and it will puzzle you to
find a man that will compare with her for goaheadativeness. The more
obstacles she encounters, the harder she struggles, and the more you
try to put her down, the more you won’t do it. Children are obliged
to write under their crude drawings, “this is a dog,” or, “this is a
horse.” If it were not for coats and pants, we should be obliged to
label, “this is a man,” in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred!

  “Insignificant love!” Why does a man offer himself a dozen times
to the same woman? Pity to take so much pains for such a trifle!
“Insignificant love!” Who gets you on your feet again, when you fail
in business, by advancing the nice little sum settled on herself
by her anxious pa? Who cheers you up, when her nerves are all in a
double-and-twisted knot, and you come home with your face long as the
moral law? Who wears her old bonnet three winters, while you smoke,
and drive, and go to the opera? Who sits up till the small hours, to
help you find the way up your own staircase? Who darns your old coat,
next morning, just as if you were a man, instead of a brute? And who
scratches any woman’s eyes out, who dares insinuate that her husband is
superior to you!

  “Insignificant love!” I wish I knew the man who wrote that article!
I’d appoint his funeral to-morrow, and it should come off too!!




A MODEL MARRIED MAN.

       Cobbett says that for two years after his marriage, he retained
     his disposition to flirt with pretty women; but at last his
     wife--probably having lost all hope of his reforming
     himself--gently tapped him upon the arm, and remarked--

       “Don’t do that. I do not like it.”

       Cobbett says:--“That was quite enough. I had never thought on
     the subject before; one hair of her head was more dear to me than
     all other women in the world; and this I knew that she knew; but
     now I saw that this was not all that she had a right to from me.
     _I saw that she had the further claim upon me that I should
     abstain from everything that might induce others to believe that
     there was any other woman for whom, even if I were at liberty, I
     had any affection._”


  Now I suppose most women, on reading that, would roll up their eyes
and think unutterable things of Mr. Cobbett! But, had _I_ borne his
musical name, and had that fine speech been addressed to me, I should
immediately have dismissed the----house-maid!

  It is not in any masculine to get on his knees that way, without a
motive! I tell you, that man was a humbug! overshot the mark, entirely;
promised ten times as much as a sinful masculine could ever perform. If
he’d said about _a quarter part_ of that, you might have believed him.
His affection for Mrs. Cobbett was skin-deep. He would have flirted
with every one of you, the minute her back was turned, to the end of
the electrical chapter!

  A man who is magnetized as he ought to be, don’t waste his precious
time making such long-winded, sentimental speeches. You never need
concern yourself, when such a glib tongue makes love to you. Go on with
your knitting; _he’s convalescent!_ getting better of his complaint
fast. Now mind what I tell you; that Cobbett was a humbug!




MEDITATIONS OF PAUL PRY, JUN.


  Not a blessed bit of gossip have I heard for a whole week! Nobody’s
run off with anybody’s wife; not a _single_ case of “Swartwouting;”
no minister’s been to the theatre; and my friend Tom, editor of the
“Sky Rocket,” (who never cares whether a rumor be true or false, or
where it hits, so that it makes a paragraph,) is quite in despair. He’s
really afraid the world is growing virtuous--says it would be a hundred
dollars in his pocket, to get hold of a bit of scandal in such a dearth
of news; and if the accused party gets obstreperous, he’d just as lief
publish one side as the other! The more fuss the better; all he’s
afraid of is, they won’t think it worth noticing!

  Ah! we’ve some new neighbors in that house; pretty woman there, at
the window; glad of that! In the first place, it rests my eyes to look
at them; in the next place, where there’s a pretty woman, you may be
morally certain there’ll be mischief, sooner or later, i. e. if they
don’t have somebody like me to look after them; therefore I shall
keep my eye on her. That’s her husband in the room, I’m certain of
it, (for all the while she is talking to him, she’s looking out the
window!) There he goes down street to his business--a regular humdrum,
henpecked, “ledger” looking Lilliputian. Was not cut out for her,
that’s certain! Well, my lady’s wide awake enough! Look at her eye! No
use in pursing up that pretty mouth!--that eye tells the story! Nice
little plump figure; coquettish turn of the head, and a spring to her
step. Well, well, I’ll keep my eyes open.

  Just as I expected! there’s a young man ringing at the door; “patent
leather,” “kid gloves,” white hand, ring on the little finger--hope she
won’t shut the blinds now. There! she has taken her seat on the sofa
at the back part of the room. She don’t escape _me_ that way, while I
own a spy-glass! Jupiter! if he is not twisting her curls round his
fingers! Wonder how old “Ledger” would like _that_!

  Tuesday.--Boy at the door with a bouquet. Can’t ring the bell; I’ll
just step out and offer to do it for him, and learn who sent it! “Has
orders not to tell;” umph! _I’ve_ no orders “not to tell;” so here goes
a note to Ledger about it; that little gipsy is stepping RATHER too
high.

  Wednesday.--Here I am tied up for a month at least; scarcely a whole
bone in my body, to say nothing of the way my feelings are hurt. How
did I know that young man was “her brother?” Why couldn’t Ledger
correct my mistake in a gentlemanly way, without daguerreotyping it
on my back with a horsewhip? It’s true I am not always correct in my
suspicions, but he ought to have looked at my motives! Suppose it
hadn’t been her brother, now! It’s astonishing, the ingratitude of
people. It’s enough to discourage all my attempts at moral reform!

  Well, it’s no use attacking that hornet’s nest again; but I’ve no
doubt some of the commandments are broken somewhere; and with the help
of some “opodeldoc” I’ll get out and find where it is!




SUNSHINE AND YOUNG MOTHERS.

       FOLLY. For girls to expect to be happy without marriage. Every
     woman was made for a mother, consequently, babies are as necessary
     to their “peace of mind,” as health. If you wish to look at
     melancholy and indigestion, look at an old maid. If you would take
     a peep at sunshine, look in the face of a young mother.


  “Young mothers and sunshine”! They are worn to fiddle strings before
they are twenty-five! When an old lover turns up, he thinks he sees his
grandmother, instead of the dear little Mary who used to make him feel
as if he should crawl out of the toes of his boots! Yes! my mind is
_quite_ made up about _matrimony_; it’s a _one-sided_ partnership.

  “Husband” gets up in the morning, and pays his _devoirs_ to the
looking-glass; curls his fine head of hair; puts on an immaculate shirt
bosom; ties an excruciating cravat; sprinkles his handkerchief with
cologne; stows away a French roll, an egg, and a cup of coffee; gets
into the omnibus, looks at the pretty girls, and makes love between
the pauses of business during the forenoon _generally_. Wife must
“hermetically seal” the windows and exclude all the fresh air, (because
the baby had “the snuffles” in the night;) and sits gasping down to
the table more dead than alive, to finish her breakfast. Tommy turns
a cup of hot coffee down his bosom; Juliana has torn off the strings
of her school bonnet; James “wants his geography covered;” Eliza can’t
find her satchel; the butcher wants to know if she’d like a joint of
mutton; the milkman would like his money; the iceman wants to speak to
her “just a minute;” the baby swallows a bean; husband sends the boy
home from the store to say _his partner_ will dine with him; the cook
leaves “all flying,” to go to her “sister’s dead baby’s wake,” and
husband’s thin coat must be ironed before noon.

  “_Sunshine and young mothers!_” Where’s my smelling bottle?




UNCLE BEN’S ATTACK OF SPRING FEVER, AND HOW HE GOT CURED.


  “It is not possible that you have been insane enough to go to
housekeeping in the country, for the summer? Oh, you ought to hear my
experience,” and Uncle Ben wiped the perspiration from his forehead, at
the very thought.

  Yes, I tried it once, with city habits and a city wife: got rabid
with the dog days, and nothing could cure me but a nibble of green
grass. There was Susan, you know, who never was off a brick pavement
in her life, and didn’t know the difference between a cheese and a
grindstone.

  Well, we ripped up our carpets, and tore down our curtains, and
packed up our crockery, and nailed down our pictures, and eat dust for
a week, and then we emigrated to Daisy Ville.

  Could I throw up a window or fasten back a blind in that house,
without sacrificing my suspenders and waistband button? No, sir! Were
not the walls full of Red Rovers? Didn’t the doors fly open at every
wind gust? Didn’t the roof leak like the mischief? Was not the chimney
leased to a pack of swallows? Was not the well a half a mile from the
house?

  Oh, you needn’t laugh. Instead of the comfortable naps to which I had
been accustomed, I had to sleep with one eye open all night, lest I
shouldn’t get into the city in time. I had to be shaving in the morning
before a rooster in the barn-yard had stirred a feather; swallowed my
coffee and toast by steam, and then, still masticating, made for the
front door. There stood Peter with my horse and gig,--for I detest your
cars and omnibuses. On the floor of the chaise was a huge basket in
which to bring home material for the next day’s dinner; on the seat was
a dress of my wife’s to be left “without fail” at Miss Sewing Silk’s,
to have the forty-seventh hook moved one-sixth of a degree higher up
on the back. Then there was a package of shawls from Tom Fools & Co.,
to be returned, and a pair of shoes to carry to Lapstone, who was to
select another pair for me to bring out at night; and a demijohn to be
filled with Sherry. Well, I whipped up Bucephalus, left my sleeping
wife and babies, and started for town; cogitating over an intricate
business snarl, which bade defiance to any straightening process. I
hadn’t gone half a mile before an old maid (I hate old maids) stopped
me to know if I was going into town, and if I was, if I wouldn’t
take her in, as the omnibusses made her sick. She said she was niece
to Squire Dandelion, and “had a few chores to do a shopping.” So I
took her in, or rather, she took _me_ in, (but she didn’t do it but
once--for I bought a sulkey next day!) Well, it came night, and I was
hungry as a Hottentot, for I never could dine, as your married widowers
_pro tem_ do, at eating-houses, where one gravy answers for flesh, fish
and fowl, and the pudding-sauce is as black as the cook’s complexion.
So I went round on an empty stomach, hunting up my _expressman
parcels_, and wending my way to the stable with arms and pockets
running over. When I got home, found my wife in despair, no tacks in
the house to nail down carpets, and not one to be had at the store in
the village; the cook had deserted because she couldn’t do without “her
_city privileges_,” (meaning Jonathan Jones, the “dry dirt” man); and
the chambermaid, a buxom country girl with fire red hair, was spinning
round the crockery (a la Blitz) because she “couldn’t eat with the
family.”

  Then Charley was taken with the croup in the night, and in my fright
I put my feet into my coat sleeves, and my arms into my pants, and put
on one of my wife’s ruffles instead of a dicky, and rode three miles in
a pelting rain, for some “goose grease” for his throat.

  Then we never found out till cherries, and strawberries, and peaches
were ripe, how many _friends_ (?) we had. There was a horse hitched at
every rail in the fence, so long as there was anything left to eat on
a tree in the farm; but if my wife went in town shopping, and called
on any of them, they were “out, or engaged;”--or if at home, had “just
done dinner, and were going to ride.”

  Then there was no school in the neighborhood for the children, and
they were out in the barn-yard feeding the pigs with lump sugar, and
chasing the hens off the nest to see what was the prospect for eggs,
and making little boats of their shoes, and sailing them in the pond,
and milking the cow in the middle of the day, &c.

  Then if I dressed in the morning in linen coat, thin pants, and straw
hat, I’d be sure to find the wind “dead east” when I got into the city;
or if I put on broadcloth and fixins to match, it would be hotter than
Shadrach’s furnace, all day--while the dense morning fog would extract
the starch from my dicky and shirt-bosom, till they looked very like a
collapsed flapjack.

  Then our meeting-house was a good two miles distant, and we had to
walk, or stay at home; because my factotum (Peter) wouldn’t stay on
the farm without he could have the horse Sundays to go to Mill Village
to see his affianced Nancy. Then the old farmers leaned on my stone
wall, and laughed till the tears came into their eyes, to see “the
city gentleman’s” experiments in horticulture, as they passed by “to
meetin’.”

  Well, sir, before summer was over, my wife and I looked as jaded as
omnibus horses--she with chance “help” and floods of city company,
and I with my arduous duties as _express man_ for my own family in
particular, and the neighbors in general.

  And now here we are--“No. 9 Kossuth square.” Can reach anything we
want, by putting our hands out the front windows. If, as the poet
says, “_man made the town_,” all I’ve got to say is--he understood his
business!




THE AGED MINISTER VOTED A DISMISSION.


[Illustration: “Your minister is getting ‘superannuated,’ is he? Well,
call a parish meeting, and vote him a dismission.”]

  Your minster is “superannuated,” is he? Well, call a parish meeting,
and vote him a dismission; hint that his usefulness is gone; that he
is given to repetition; that he puts his hearers to sleep. Turn him
adrift, like a blind horse, or a lame house dog. Never mind that he
has grown gray in your thankless service--that he has smiled upon your
infants at the baptismal font, given them lovingly away in marriage to
their heart’s chosen, and wept with you when Death’s shadow darkened
your door. Never mind that he has laid aside his pen, and listened
many a time, and oft, with courteous grace to your tedious, prosy
conversations, when his moments were like gold dust; never mind that he
has patiently and uncomplainingly accepted at your hands, the smallest
pittance that would sustain life, because “the Master” whispered in his
ear, “Tarry here till I come.” Never mind that the wife of his youth,
whom he won from a home of luxury, is broken down with privation and
fatigue, and _your_ thousand unnecessary demands upon her strength,
patience, and time. Never mind that his children, at an early age, were
exiled from the parsonage roof, because there was not “bread enough
and to spare,” in their father’s house. Never mind that his library
consists only of a Bible, a Concordance, and a Dictionary; and that to
the luxury of a religious newspaper, he has been long years a stranger.
Never mind that his wardrobe would be spurned by many a mechanic in
our cities; never mind that he has “risen early and sat up late,” and
tilled the ground with weary limbs, for earthly “manna,” while his
glorious intellect lay in fetters--_for you_. Never mind all _that_;
call a parish meeting, and vote him “superannuated.” Don’t spare him
the starting tear of sensibility, or the flush of wounded pride, by
delicately offering to settle a colleague, that your aged pastor may
rest on his staff in grateful, gray-haired independence. No! _turn the
old patriarch out_; give him time to go to the moss-grown church-yard,
and say farewell to his unconscious dead, and then give “the right hand
of fellowship” to some beardless, pedantic, noisy college boy, who will
save your sexton the trouble of pounding the pulpit cushions; and who
will tell you and the Almighty, in his prayers, all the political news
of the week.




THE FATAL MARRIAGE.


  A very pretty girl was Lucy Lee. Don’t ask me to describe her; stars,
and gems, and flowers, have long since been exhausted in depicting
heroines. Suffice it to say, Lucy was as pretty a little fairy as ever
stepped foot in a slipper or twisted a ringlet.

  Of course, Lucy knew she was pretty; else why did the gentlemen stare
at her so? Why did Harry Graham send her so many bouquets? Why did Mr.
Smith and Mr. Jones try to sit each other out in an evening call? Why
were picnics and fairs postponed, if she were engaged or ill? Why did
so many young men request an introduction? Why did all the serenaders
come beneath her window? Why was a pew or omnibus never full when she
appeared at the door? And last, though not least, why did all the women
imitate and hate her so?

  We will do Miss Lucy the justice to say, that she bore her blushing
honors very meekly. She never flaunted her conquest in the faces of
less attractive feminines; no, Lucy was the farthest remove from a
coquette; but kind words and bright smiles were as natural to her as
fragrance to flowers, or music to birds. She never _tried_ to win
hearts; and between you and me, I think that’s the way she did it.

  Grave discussions were often held about Lucy’s future husband;
the old maids scornfully asserting that “beauties generally pick up
a crooked stick at last,” while the younger ones cared very little
_whom_ she married, if she only _were_ married and out of _their_ way.
Meanwhile, Lucy smiled at her own happy thoughts, and sat at her little
window on pleasant, summer evenings, watching for Harry, (poor Harry,)
who, when he came, was at a loss to know if he had ever given her
little heart one flutter, so merrily did she laugh and chat with him.
Skillful little Lucy, it was very right you shouldn’t let him peep into
_your_ heart till he had opened a window in _his own_.

  Lucy’s papa didn’t approve of late hours or lovers; moonlight
he considered but another name for rheumatism; at nine o’clock,
precisely, he rung the bell each evening for family prayers; and
when the Bible came in lovers were expected to go out: in case they
were obtuse,--chairs set back against the wall, or an extra lamp
blown out, or the fire taken apart, were hints sufficiently broad to
be understood; and they generally answered the purpose. Miss Lucy’s
little lamp, glowing immediately after from her bed-room window, gave
the _finale_ to the “Mede and Persian” order of Mr. Lee’s family
arrangements.

  Still, Lee house was not a hermitage, by any means. More white
cravats and black coats passed over “Deacon” Lee’s threshold, than
into any hotel in Yankeedom. Little Lucy’s mother, too, was a modern
Samaritan, never weary of experimenting on their dyspeptic and
bronchial affections; while Lucy herself (bless her kind heart) knew
full well that two-thirds of them had large families, empty purses,
and more Judases and Paul Prys than “Aarons and Hurs” in their
congregations.

  Among the _habitués_ of Lee house, none were so acceptable to Lucy’s
father, as Mr. Ezekiel Clark, a bachelor of fifty, an ex-minister, and
now an agent for some “Benevolent Society.” Ezekiel had an immensely
solemn face; and behind this convenient mask he was enabled to carry
out, undetected, various little plans, ostensibly for the “society’s”
benefit, but privately--for his own personal aggrandizement. When
Ezekiel’s opinion was asked, he crossed his hands and feet, and
fastened his eyes upon the wall, in an attitude of the deepest
abstraction, while his questioner stood on one leg, awaiting, with the
most intense anxiety, the decision of such an oracular Solomon. Well,
not to weary you, the long and short of it was, that Solomon was a
stupid fool, who spent his time trying to humbug the religious public
in general, and Deacon Lee in particular, into the belief that had _he_
been consulted before this world was made, he could have suggested
great and manifold improvements. As to Deacon Lee, no cat ever tossed
a poor mouse more dexterously than he played with the deacon’s free
will; all the while very demurely pocketing the spoils in the shape of
“donations” to the “society,” with which he appeased his washerwoman
and tailor, and transported himself across the country, on trips to
Newport, Saratoga, &c., &c.

  His favorite plan was yet to be carried out; which was no more or
less than a modest request for the deacon’s pretty daughter, Lucy, in
marriage. Mr. Lee rubbed his chin, and said, “Lucy was nothing but a
foolish little girl;” but Ezekiel overruled it, by remarking that that
was so much the more reason she should have a husband some years her
senior, with some knowledge of the world, qualified to check and advise
her; to all of which, after an extra pinch of snuff, and another look
into Ezekiel’s oracular face, Deacon Lee assented.

  Poor little Lucy! Ezekiel knew very well that her father’s word was
law, and when Mr. Lee announced him as her future husband, she knew she
was just as much Mrs. Ezekiel Clark, as if the bridal ring had been
already slipped on her fairy finger. She sighed heavily, to be sure,
and patted her little foot nervously, and when she handed him his tea,
thought he looked older than ever; while Ezekiel swallowed one cup
after another, till his eyes snapped and glowed like a panther’s in
ambush. That night poor Lucy pressed her lips to a faded rose, the gift
of Harry Graham; then, cried herself to sleep!

  Unbounded was the indignation of Lucy’s admirers, when the
sanctimonious Ezekiel was announced as the expectant bridegroom.
Harry Graham took the first steamer for Europe, railing at “woman’s
fickleness.” (Consistent Harry! when never a word of love had passed
his moustached lip.)

  Shall I tell you how Ezekiel was transformed into the most ridiculous
of lovers? how his self-conceit translated Lucy’s indifference into
maiden coyness? how he looked often in the glass and thought he was
not so _very_ old after all? how he advised Lucy to tuck away all her
bright curls, because they “looked so childish?” how he named to her
papa an “early marriage day,”--not that he felt nervous about losing
his prize--oh, no (?)--but because “the society’s business required
his undivided attention.”

  Well; Lucy, in obedience to her father’s orders, stood up in her
snow-white robe, and vowed “to love and cherish” a man just her
father’s age, with whom she had not the slightest congeniality of taste
or feeling. But papa had said it was an excellent match, and Lucy
never gainsayed papa; still, her long lashes drooped heavily over her
blue eyes, and her hand trembled, and her cheek grew deathly pale, as
Ezekiel handed her to the carriage that whirled them rapidly away.

  Shall I tell you how long months and years dragged wearily on? how
Lucy saw through her husband’s mask of hypocrisy and self-conceit?
how to indifference succeeded disgust? how Harry Graham returned from
Europe, with a fair young English bride? how Lucy grew nervous and
hysterical? how Ezekiel soon wearied of his sick wife, and left her in
one of those _tombs_ for the wretched, an insane hospital? and how she
wasted, day by day--then _died_, with only a hired nurse to close those
weary blue eyes?

  In a quiet corner of the old churchyard where Lucy sleeps, a
silver-haired old man, each night at dew-fall, paces to and fro, with
remorseless tread, as if by that weary vigil he would fain atone to the
unconscious sleeper, for turning her sweet young life to bitterness.




FRANCES SARGEANT OSGOOD.

    “I’m passing through the eternal gates,
    Ere June’s sweet roses blow.”


  So sang the dying poetess. The “eternal gates” have closed upon
her. Those dark, soul-lit eyes beam upon us no more. “June” has come
again, with its “sweet roses,” its birds, its zephyrs, its flowers and
fragrance. It is such a day as her passionate heart would have reveled
in--a day of Eden-like freshness and beauty. I will gather some fair,
sweet flowers, and visit her grave.

  “Show me Mrs. Fanny Osgood’s monument, please,” said I to the rough
gardener, who was spading the turf in Mount Auburn.

  “In Orange Avenue, Ma’am,” he replied, respectfully indicating, with
a wave of the hand, the path I was to pursue.

  Tears started to my eyes, as I trod reverently down the quiet path.
The little birds she loved so well, were skimming confidingly and
joyously along before me, and singing as merrily as if my heart echoed
back their gleeful songs.

  I approached the enclosure, as the gardener had directed me. There
were five graves. _In which_ slept the poetess? for there was _not even
a headstone_! The flush of indignant feeling mounted to my temples;
the warm tears started from my eyes. _She was forgotten!_ Sweet, gifted
Fanny! _in her own family burial place she was forgotten!_ The stranger
from a distance, who had worshiped her genius, might in vain make a
pilgrimage to do her honor. I, who had personally known and loved her,
had not even the poor consolation of decking the bosom of her grave
with the flowers I had gathered; I could not kiss the turf beneath
which she is reposing; I could not drop a tear on the sod, ’neath which
her remains are mouldering back to their native dust. I could not tell,
(though I so longed to know,) in which of the little graves--for there
were several--slept her “dear May,” her “pure Ellen;” the little,
timid, household do

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