There are literary green-groceries at every corner,
which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It
takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.--
we won't say who,--editor of the--we won't say what, offered me the
sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my
young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating
vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its
wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to
be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal
expression of past fact or present intention.
- Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads
to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
- I don't believe one word of what you are saying,--spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,--I said, and added softly to
my next neighbor,--but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone,--Optime dictum.
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