oung girl here--if she doos n't kill herself with
writing for them news papers,--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. H