rhyme about the hen.

Bel was named for her Aunt Belinda. Miss Belinda Bree came up for a
week, sometimes, in the summer, to the farm. All the rest of the
year she worked hard in the city. She put a good face upon it in
her talk among her old neighbors. She spoke of the grand streets,
the parades, Duke's balls,--for which she made dresses,--and
jubilees, of which she heard afar off,--as if she were part and
parcel of all Boston enterprise and magnificence. It was a great
thing, truly, to live in the Hub. Honestly, she had not got over it
since she came there, a raw country girl, and began her
apprenticeship to its wonders and to her own trade. She could not
turn a water faucet, nor light her gas, nor count the strokes of the
electric fire alarm, without feeling the grandeur of having
Cochituate turned on to wash her hands,--of making her one little
spark of the grand illumination under which the Three Hills shone
every night,--of dwelling within ear-shot and protection of the
quietly imposing system of wires and bells that worked by lightning
against a fierce element of daily danger. She was proud of
policemen; she was thrilled at the sound of steam-engines thundering
along the pavements; she felt as if she had a hand in it. When they
fired guns upon the Common, she could only listen and look out of
windows; the little boys ran and shouted for her in the streets;
that is what the little boys are for. Somebody must do the running
and the shouting to relieve the instincts of older and busier
people, who must pretend as if they didn't care.

All this kept Miss Belinda Bree from utterly wearing out at her dull
work in the great warerooms, or now and then at days' seamstressing
in families. It really keeps a great many people from wearing out.

Miss Bree's work _was_ dull. The days of her early "mantua making"
were over. Twenty years had made things very different in Boston.
The "nice families" had been more quiet then; the quietest of them
now cannot manage things as they did in those days; for the same
reason that you cannot buy old-fashioned "wearing" goods; they are
not in the market. "Sell and wear out; wear out and sell;" that is
the principle of to-day. You must do as the world does; there is no
other path cut through. If you travel, you must keep on night and
day, or wait twenty-four hours and start in the night again.

Nobody--or scarcely anybody--has a dress-maker now, in the old, cosy
way, of the old, cosy so