er lot is a trying one; it
repeats the doom of the Danaides. The "Weekly Bucket" has no bottom, and
it is her business to help fill it. Imagine for one moment what it is
to tell a tale that must flow on, flow ever, without pausing; the lover
miserable and happy this week, to begin miserable again next week and
end as before; the villain scowling, plotting, punished; to scowl,
plot, and get punished again in our next; an endless series of woes and
busses, into each paragraph of which the forlorn artist has to throw all
the liveliness, all the emotion, all the graces of style she is mistress
of, for the wages of a maid of all work, and no more recognition or
thanks from anybody than the apprentice who sets the types for the paper
that prints her ever-ending and ever-beginning stories. And yet she has
a pretty talent, sensibility, a natural way of writing, an ear for
the music of verse, in which she sometimes indulges to vary the dead
monotony of everlasting narrative, and a sufficient amount of invention
to make her stories readable. I have found my eyes dimmed over them
oftener than once, more with thinking about her, perhaps, than about
her heroes and heroines. Poor little body! Poor little mind! Poor
little soul! She is one of that great company of delicate, intelligent,
emotional young creatures, who are waiting, like that sail I spoke of,
for some breath of heaven to fill their white bosoms,--love, the
right of every woman; religious emotion, sister of love, with the same
passionate eyes, but cold, thin, bloodless hands,--some enthusiasm of
humanity or divinity; and find that life offers them, instead, a seat
on a wooden bench, a chain to fasten them to it, and a heavy oar to pull
day and night. We read the Arabian tales and pity the doomed lady who
must amuse her lord and master from day to day or have her head cut off;
how much better is a mouth without bread to fill it than no mouth at all
to fill, because no head? We have all round us a weary-eyed company of
Scheherezades! This is one of them, and I may call her by that name when
it pleases me to do so.

The next boarder I have to mention is the one who sits between the Young
Girl and the Landlady. In a little chamber into which a small thread of
sunshine finds its way for half an hour or so every day during a month
or six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all other times obliged to
content itself with ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, without
wronging