Sam,--I am
in prison for debt; come and assist your loving mother, E.
Foote.'--'Dear Mother,--So am I; which prevents his duty being paid to
his loving mother by her affectionate son, Sam Foote.' Not everybody,
however, can wind up a letter so neatly as that. A certain commercial
house abroad was, perhaps, over-ingenious in its turn of phrase when,
writing to an English correspondent, and desiring to be very civil to
him, it said: 'Sugars are falling more and more every day; not so the
respect and esteem with which we are,' etc., etc.

POSTSCRIPTS.

There is, and long has been, a prevalent impression that the penning of
postscripts is peculiarly characteristic of the feminine letter-writer.
Cynics have even gone so far as to assert that no woman can indite an
epistle without the addition of a 'P.S.,' and, in support of this
grievous aspersion, have been wont to trot out the venerable 'chestnut'
about the lady who accepted from her husband a bet that she would not
send him a letter without the inevitable addendum--the result being
that, after having composed the epistle and signed her name, she
artlessly appended the observation, 'You see I _have_ written you a
letter without a postscript,' capping it with 'Who has won the wager,
you or I?'

It might be argued, even if it could not be proved, that, putting aside
mere business communications, and confining one's self to ordinary
social correspondence, men are guilty of as many postscripts as women
are. But even if the stereotyped charge against the ladies be really
well-founded, what of it? Does it convey any tangible reproach? What
harm is there in a 'P.S.,' or a 'P.P.S.'? It may be not only a
defensible, but positively a praiseworthy, thing. Often it proceeds from
nothing more condemnable than a genuine overflow of feeling--a stream of
sentiment which, checked by the signature of the writer, bursts its
bonds and reasserts its power in a final sentence or two. What could be
more charming, for example, than the instances of this afforded in so
many of the heroic Lady Russell's letters to her husband--as in that
particularly pleasing one in which, after assuring him that all the
household are well, and that as he is 'the most enduring husband in the
world,' so she is 'the most grateful wife,' she adds her signature, and
then recurs to the subject of her children--'Boy is asleep, girls
singing abed'--telling of the proposed kindness of a neighbour towards
them