—­I don’t quite like to tell folks what a lucky place my boarding-house is, for fear I should have all sorts of people crowding in to be my boarders for the sake of their chances.  Folks come here poor and they go away rich.  Young women come here without a friend in the world, and the next thing that happens is a gentleman steps up to ’em and says, “If you’ll take me for your pardner for life, I’ll give you a good home and love you ever so much besides”; and off goes my young lady-boarder into a fine three-story house, as grand as the governor’s wife, with everything to make her comfortable, and a husband to care for her into the bargain.  That’s the way it is with the young ladies that comes to board with me, ever since the gentleman that wrote the first book that advertised my establishment (and never charged me a cent for it neither) merried the Schoolma’am.  And I think but that’s between you and me—­that it ’s going to be the same thing right over again between that young gentleman and this young girl here—­if she doos n’t kill herself with writing for them news papers,—­it ’s too bad they don’t pay her more for writing her stories, for I read one of ’em that made me cry so the Doctor—­my Doctor Benjamin—­said, “Ma, what makes your eyes look so?” and wanted to rig a machine up and look at ’em, but I told him what the matter was, and that he needn’t fix up his peeking contrivances on my account,—­anyhow she’s a nice young woman as ever lived, and as industrious with that pen of hers as if she was at work with a sewing-machine,—­and there ain’t much difference, for that matter, between sewing on shirts and writing on stories,—­one way you work with your foot, and the other way you work with your fingers, but I rather guess there’s more headache in the stories than there is in the stitches, because you don’t have to think quite so hard while your foot’s going as you do when your fingers is at work, scratch, scratch, scratch, scribble, scribble, scribble.

It occurred to me that this last suggestion of the Landlady was worth considering by the soft-handed, broadcloth-clad spouters to the laboring classes,—­so called in distinction from the idle people who only contrive the machinery and discover the processes and lay out the work and draw the charts and organize the various movements which keep the world going and make it tolerable.  The organ-blower works harder with his muscles, for that matter, than the organ player, and may perhaps be exasperated into thinking himself a downtrodden martyr because he does not receive the same pay for his services.

I will not pretend that it needed the Landlady’s sagacious guess about the Young Astronomer and his pupil to open my eyes to certain possibilities, if not probabilities, in that direction.  Our Scheherezade kept on writing her stories according to agreement, so many pages for so many dollars, but some of her readers began to complain that they could not always follow her quite so well as in her earlier efforts.