ring upstart fool;--
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But _all_ must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share,--
I ask but _one_ recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch;
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them _much_.--
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!

MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

(_A Parenthesis_.)

I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
this one. I found the effect of going out every morning was decidedly
favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the places for which
were just marked when she came, played, shadowy, in her freshening
cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to me from the
schoolhouse-steps.

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if I
should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen walks
we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint from my
friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own risk and
expense, would be the proper method of bringing them before the
public.

--I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie which
works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into
a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed
on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her
bones and marrow.--Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not,
she should have been moulded in the rose-red clay of Love, before the
breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love-capacity is a
congenital endowment; and I think, after a while, one gets to know the
warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits
of it.--Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but
pride, in the sense of contemning others less gifted than herself,
deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are Small-pox and Bankruptcy.--She who nips off the end of
a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to bestow upon
those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims the
fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of bad blood.
Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people gracious in proper
measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with her real equals, she
has something about herself or her family she