by admiring crowds, all crying out, "Was there ever
such a wonder of a woman?" You would like admiration? Consider the
tax you pay for it. You would be alone were you eminent. Were you
so distinguished from your neighbors I will not say by a beard and
whiskers, that were odious--but by a great and remarkable intellectual
superiority--would you, do you think, be any the happier? Consider envy.
Consider solitude. Consider the jealousy and torture of mind which this
Kentucky lady must feel, suppose she should hear that there is, let us
say, a Missouri prodigy, with a beard larger than hers? Consider how she
is separated from her kind by the possession of that wonder of a beard?
When that beard grows gray, how lonely she will be, the poor old thing!
If it falls off, the public admiration falls off too; and how she will
miss it--the compliments of the trumpeters, the admiration of the crowd,
the gilded progress of the car. I see an old woman alone in a decrepit
old caravan, with cobwebs on the knocker, with a blistered ensign
flapping idly over the door. Would you like to be that deserted person?
Ah, Chloe! To be good, to be simple, to be modest, to be loved, be thy
lot. Be thankful thou art not taller, nor stronger, nor richer, nor
wiser than the rest of the world!

ON LETTS'S DIARY.

Mine is one of your No. 12 diaries, three shillings cloth boards;
silk limp, gilt edges, three-and-six; French morocco, tuck ditto,
four-and-six. It has two pages, ruled with faint lines for memoranda,
for every week, and a ruled account at the end, for the twelve months
from January to December, where you may set down your incomings and your
expenses. I hope yours, my respected reader, are large; that there are
many fine round sums of figures on each side of the page: liberal on the
expenditure side, greater still on the receipt. I hope, sir, you will
be "a better man," as they say, in '62 than in this moribund '61, whose
career of life is just coming to its terminus. A better man in purse? in
body? in soul's health? Amen, good sir, in all. Who is there so good
in mind, body or estate, but bettering won't still be good for him?
O unknown Fate, presiding over next year, if you will give me better
health, a better appetite, a better digestion, a better income, a better
temper in '62 than you have bestowed in '61, I think your servant will
be the better for the changes. For instance, I should be the better for
a new coat. This one, I a