nd,
For fast as kee how could my old legs travel?
But--immorigerous brutes!--with feet immund
They seemed to try my broadcloth garb to javel.
The semblance of a mumper then I wore,
Though a faldisdory before I might have graced;
Eftsoons I found, when standing flames before,
The mud to siccate, it was soon erased.
If we should turn our attention studiously to this line of literary
effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of
late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of
fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted
firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious
privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among
the 'tallow dips' of parrot-poetry.
A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM.
MY DEAR CONTINENTAL:
When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a
habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk;
high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage,
impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively;
always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of
anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'
Is it not possible that we may be coming to--no servants at all? To me
the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public
servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does
private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps;
hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp
Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the
employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can,
and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue
his tastes to suit the whims of the _enemigos pagados_, as the Spaniards
call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly
employes (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street
sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware
that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the
two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and
Tide--because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers
of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before
the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic
economy that
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