ted 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