illains.

They always save up all the old scraps of printed rubbish you throw on
the floor, and stack them up carefully on the table, and start the fire
with your valuable manuscripts. If there is any one particular old scrap
that you are more down on than any other, and which you are gradually
wearing your life out trying to get rid of, you may take all the pains
you possibly can in that direction, but it won't be of any use, because
they will always fetch that old scrap back and put it in the same old
place again every time. It does them good.

And they use up more hair-oil than any six men. If charged with
purloining the same, they lie about it. What do they care about a
hereafter? Absolutely nothing.

If you leave the key in the door for convenience' sake, they will carry
it down to the office and give it to the clerk. They do this under the
vile pretense of trying to protect your property from thieves; but
actually they do it because they want to make you tramp back down-stairs
after it when you come home tired, or put you to the trouble of sending a
waiter for it, which waiter will expect you to pay him something. In
which case I suppose the degraded creatures divide.

They keep always trying to make your bed before you get up, thus
destroying your rest and inflicting agony upon you; but after you get up,
they don't come any more till next day.

They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out
of pure cussedness, and nothing else.

Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct.

If I can get a bill through the legislature abolishing chambermaids, I
mean to do it.

AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN--[Written about 1865.]

The facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady
who lives in the beautiful city of San Jose; she is perfectly unknown to
me, and simply signs herself "Aurelia Maria," which may possibly be a
fictitious name. But no matter, the poor girl is almost heartbroken by
the misfortunes she has undergone, and so confused by the conflicting
counsels of misguided friends and insidious enemies that she does not
know what course to pursue in order to extricate herself from the web of
difficulties in which she seems almost hopelessly involved. In this
dilemma she turns to me for help, and supplicates for my guidance and
instruction with a moving eloquence that would touch the heart of a
statue. Hear her sad story:

She says that when sh