第19章

-Yes, yes; did you ever see how they will poke those wonderful little fingers of theirs into every fold and crack and crevice they can get at? That is their first education, feeling their way into the solid facts of the material world.When they begin to talk it is the same thing over again in another shape.If there is a crack or a flaw in your answer to their confounded shoulder-hitting questions, they will poke and poke until they have got it gaping just as the baby's fingers have made a rent out of that atom of a hole in his pinafore that your old eyes never took notice of.Then they make such fools of us by copying on a small scale what we do in the grand manner.Iwonder if it ever occurs to our dried-up neighbor there to ask himself whether That Boy's collection of flies is n't about as significant in the Order of Things as his own Museum of Beetles?

--I couldn't help thinking that perhaps That Boy's questions about the simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind of significance as the Master's inquiries into the Order of Things.

--On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries about him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied sources of comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable.The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,--perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco.As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more about him.

--The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can hardly be more than nineteen or twenty years old.I wish I could paint her so as to interest others as much as she does me.But she has not a profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster, and a cheek where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their old quarrel with alternating victory.Her hair is brown, her cheek is delicately pallid, her forehead is too ample for a ball-room beauty's.A single faint line between the eyebrows is the record of long--continued anxious efforts to please in the task she has chosen, or rather which has been forced upon her.It is the same line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers who has visited us; the same which is so striking on the masks of singing women painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,--that Himalayan home of harmony which you are to see and then die, if you don't live where you can see and hear it often.Many deaths have happened in a neighboring large city from that well-known complaint, Icterus Invidiosorum, after returning from a visit to the Music Hall.The invariable symptom of a fatal attack is the Risus Sardonicus.--But the Young Girl.She gets her living by writing stories for a newspaper.Every week she furnishes a new story.If her head aches or her heart is heavy, so that she does not come to time with her story, she falls behindhand and has to live on credit.It sounds well enough to say that "she supports herself by her pen," but her lot is a trying one; it repeats the doom of the Danaides.The "Weekly Bucket" has no bottom, and it is her business to help fill it.Imagine for one moment what it is to tell a tale that must flow on, flow ever, without pausing; the lover miserable and happy this week, to begin miserable again next week and end as before; the villain scowling, plotting, punished; to scowl, plot, and get punished again in our next; an endless series of woes and busses, into each paragraph of which the forlorn artist has to throw all the liveliness, all the emotion, all the graces of style she is mistress of, for the wages of a maid of all work, and no more recognition or thanks from anybody than the apprentice who sets the types for the paper that prints her ever-ending and ever-beginning stories.And yet she has a pretty talent, sensibility, a natural way of writing, an ear for the music of verse, in which she sometimes indulges to vary the dead monotony of everlasting narrative, and a sufficient amount of invention to make her stories readable.I have found my eyes dimmed over them oftener than once, more with thinking about her, perhaps, than about her heroes and heroines.Poor little body!

Poor little mind! Poor little soul! She is one of that great company of delicate, intelligent, emotional young creatures, who are waiting, like that sail I spoke of, for some breath of heaven to fill their white bosoms,--love, the right of every woman; religious emotion, sister of love, with the same passionate eyes, but cold, thin, bloodless hands,--some enthusiasm of humanity or divinity; and find that life offers them, instead, a seat on a wooden bench, a chain to fasten them to it, and a heavy oar to pull day and night.

We read the Arabian tales and pity the doomed lady who must amuse her lord and master from day to day or have her head cut off; how much better is a mouth without bread to fill it than no mouth at all to fill, because no head? We have all round us a weary-eyed company of Scheherezades! This is one of them, and I may call her by that name when it pleases me to do so.