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

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.

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 two pairs of shoes, at three shillings a pair, and nine yards of calico, for a dress, at six cents 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.

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:

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. Humph!– 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?”

“Mrs. Stubbs!” 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.”

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

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