butts with the rifle, when the poor captain only scored 18; give him twenty in fifty at billiards and beat him; and draw tears from the professional Italian people by her exquisite performance (of voice and violoncello) in the evening;—­I say, if a novelist would be popular with ladies—­the great novel-readers of the world—­this is the sort of heroine who would carry him through half a dozen editions.  Suppose I had asked that Bearded Lady to sing?  Confess, now, miss, you would not have been displeased if I had told you that she had a voice like Lablache, only ever so much lower.

My dear, you would like to be a heroine?  You would like to travel in triumphal caravans; to see your effigy placarded on city walls; to have your levees attended 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