foot upon the treadle, and the bands pulled, and the wheel sped, and the fire flew, and it seemed as if, in the heat and pressure and agony, I should die.  I was ground, and rubbed, and oiled, and polished, till I glittered in the sun; and one day, when young Harriet was preparing for the season, I plunged into the fray.  I almost lost my senses among the ribbons, and flew up and down among the flounces, and went mad amongst the basques.  I move round as gay as when I was young; and modern scissors, with their stumpy ends, and loose pivots, and weak blades, and glaring bows, and course shanks, are stupid beside an old family piece like me.  You would be surprised how spry I am flying around the sewing-room, cutting corsage into heart-shape, and slitting a place for button holes, and making double-breasted jackets, and hollowing scallops, and putting the last touches on velvet arabesques and Worth overskirts.  I feel almost as well at eighty years of age as at ten, and I lie down to sleep at night amid all the fineries of the wardrobe, on olive-green cashmere, and beside pannier puffs, and pillowed on feathers of ostrich.

Oh! what a gay life the scissors live!  I may lie on gayest lady’s lap, and little children like me better than almost anything else to play with.  The trembling octogenarian takes me by the hand, and the rollicking four-year-old puts on me his dimpled fingers.  Mine are the children’s curls and the bride’s veil.  I am welcomed to the Christmas tree, and the sewing-machine, and the editor’s table.  I have cut my way through the ages.  Beside pen, and sword, and needle, I dare to stand anywhere, indispensable to the race, the world-renowned scissors!

But I had a sad mission once.  The bell tolled in the New England village because a soul had passed.  I sat up all the night cutting the pattern for a shroud.  Oh, it was gloomy work.  There was wailing in the house, but I could not stop to mourn.  I had often made the swaddling-clothes for a child, but that was the only time I fashioned a robe for the grave.  To fit it around the little neck, and make the sleeves just long enough for the quiet arms—­it hurt me more than the tilt hammers that smote me in Sheffield, than the files of the scissors-grinder at the door.  I heard heart-strings snap as I went through the linen, and in the white pleats to be folded over the still heart I saw the snow banked on a grave.  Give me, the old scissors, fifty bridal dresses to make rather than one shroud to prepare.

I never recovered from the chill of those dismal days, but at the end of life I can look back and feel that I have done my work well.  Other scissors have frayed and unraveled the garments they touched, but I have always made a clean path through the linen or the damask I was called to divide.  Others screeched complainingly at their toil; I smoothly worked my jaws.  Many of the fingers that wrought with me have ceased to open and shut, and my own time will