rs,--it 's too bad they don't pay her more for writing her
stories, for I read one of 'em that made me cry so the Doctor--my Doctor
Benjamin--said, "Ma, what makes your eyes look so?" and wanted to rig a
machine up and look at 'em, but I told him what the matter was, and that
he needn't fix up his peeking contrivances on my account,--anyhow she's a
nice young woman as ever lived, and as industrious with that pen of hers
as if she was at work with a sewing-machine,--and there ain't much
difference, for that matter, between sewing on shirts and writing on
stories,--one way you work with your foot, and the other way you work
with your fingers, but I rather guess there's more headache in the
stories than there is in the stitches, because you don't have to think
quite so hard while your foot's going as you do when your fingers is at
work, scratch, scratch, scratch, scribble, scribble, scribble.

It occurred to me that this last suggestion of the Landlady was worth
considering by the soft-handed, broadcloth-clad spouters to the laboring
classes,--so called in distinction from the idle people who only contrive
the machinery and discover the processes and lay out the work and draw
the charts and organize the various movements which keep the world going
and make it tolerable. The organ-blower works harder with his muscles,
for that matter, than the organ player, and may perhaps be exasperated
into thinking himself a downtrodden martyr because he does not receive
the same pay for his services.

I will not pretend that it needed the Landlady's sagacious guess about
the Young Astronomer and his pupil to open my eyes to certain
possibilities, if not probabilities, in that direction. Our Scheherezade
kept on writing her stories according to agreement, so many pages for so
many dollars, but some of her readers began to complain that they could
not always follow her quite so well as in her earlier efforts. It seemed
as if she must have fits of absence. In one instance her heroine began as
a blonde and finished as a brunette; not in consequence of the use of any
cosmetic, but through simple inadvertence. At last it happened in one of
her stories that a prominent character who had been killed in an early
page, not equivocally, but mortally, definitively killed, done for, and
disposed of, reappeared as if nothing had happened towards the close of
her narrative. Her mind was on something else, and she had got two
stories mixed up and