THE BLACK BROTHERS.

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THE LADY OF SHALOTT.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

It is not generally known that the Lady of Shalott lived last summer in an attic, at the east end of South Street.

The wee-est, thinnest, whitest little lady!  And yet the brightest, stillest, and withal such a smiling little lady!

If you had held her up by the window,—­for she could not hold up herself,—­she would have hung like a porcelain transparency in your hands.  And if you had said, laying her gently down, and giving the tears a smart dash, that they should not fall on her lifted face, “Poor child!” the Lady of Shalott would have said, “O, don’t!” and smiled.  And you would have smiled yourself, for very surprise that she should outdo you; and between the two there would have been so much smiling done that one would have fairly thought it was a delightful thing to live last summer in an attic at the east end of South Street.

This perhaps was the more natural in the Lady of Shalott because she had never lived anywhere else.

When the Lady of Shalott was five years old, her mother threw her down stairs one day, by mistake, instead of the whiskey-jug.

This is a fact which I think Mr. Tennyson has omitted to mention in his poem.

They picked up the Lady of Shalott and put her on the bed; and there she lay from that day until last summer, unless, as I said, somebody had occasion to use her for a transparency.

The mother and the jug both went down the stairs together a few years after, and never came up at all,—­and that was a great convenience, for the Lady of Shalott’s palace in the attic was not large, and they took up much unnecessary room.

Since that the Lady of Shalott had lived with her sister, Sary Jane.

Sary Jane made nankeen vests, at sixteen and three quarters cents a dozen.

Sary Jane had red hair, and crooked shoulders, and a voice so much like a rat-trap which she sometimes set on the stairs that the Lady of Shalott could seldom tell which was which until she had thought about it a little while.  When there was a rat caught, she was apt to ask “What?” and when Sary Jane spoke, she more often than not said, “There’s another!”

Her crooked shoulders Sary Jane had acquired from sitting under the eaves of the palace to sew.  That physiological problem was simple.  There was not room enough under the eaves to sit straight.

Sary Jane’s red hair was the result of sitting in the sun on July noons under those eaves, to see to thread her needle.  There was no question about that.  The Lady of Shalott had settled it in her own mind, past dispute.  Sary Jane’s hair had been—­what was it? brown? once.  Sary Jane was slowly taking fire.  Who would not, to sit in the sun in that palace?  The only matter of surprise to the Lady of Shalott was that the palace itself did not smoke.  Sometimes, when Sary Jane hit the rafters, she was sure that she saw sparks.