rents were cheaper and flour low. It was a monkey, with whiskers
and a calico jacket, who jumped out of a box when the cover was lifted;
and then you crushed him down and hasped him in. Sometimes she wished
that she had never had that monkey, he was so much like the people
coming in and out of the sidewalk.

In fact, there was a monotony about all the people in the Lady of
Shalott's looking-glass. If their faces were not dirty, their hands were.
If they had hats, they went without shoes. If they did not sit in the
sun with their heads on their knees, they lay in the mud with their
heads on a jug.

"Their faces look blue!" she said to Sary Jane.

"No wonder!" snapped Sary Jane.

"Why?" asked the Lady of Shalott.

"Wonder is we ain't all dead!" barked Sary Jane.

The people in the Lady of Shalott's glass died, however,
sometimes,--often in the summer; more often last summer, when the attic
smoked continually, and she mistook Sary Jane's voice for the rat-trap
every day.

The people were jostled into pine boxes (in the glass), and carried away
(in the glass) by twilight, in a cart. Three of the monkeys from the
spring-box in the sidewalk went, in one week, out into the foul, purple
twilight, away from the looking-glass, in carts.

"I'm glad of that, poor things!" said the Lady of Shalott, for she had
always felt a kind of sorrow for the monkeys. Principally, I think,
because they had no glass.

When the monkeys had gone, the sickly twilight folded itself up, over
the spring-box, into great feathers, like the feathers of a wing. That
was pleasant. The Lady of Shalott could almost put out her fingers and
stroke it, it hung so near, and was so clear, and gathered such a
peacefulness into the looking-glass.

"Sary Jane, dear, it's very pleasant," said the Lady of Shalott. Sary
Jane said it was very dangerous, the Lord knew, and bit her threads off.

"And, Sary Jane, dear!" added the Lady of Shalott, "I see so many other
pleasant things."

"The more fool you!" said Sary Jane.

But she wondered about it that day over her tenth nankeen vest. What,
for example, _could_ the Lady of Shalott see?

"Waves!" said the Lady of Shalott, suddenly, as if she had been asked
the question. Sary Jane jumped. She said, "Nonsense!" For the Lady of
Shalott had only seen the little wash-tub full of dingy water on Sunday
nights, and the dirty little hydrant (in the glass) spouting dingy jets.
She would not have known a wave if she