RESOURCE FOR YOUNG LADIES.
WHY should young ladies in distress commit suicide, or turn governesses in genteel families, when they might earn a decent competence by penny-a-lining? Can they? Why yes, to be sure they can. For example, here is a piece of that work as characteristic as crochet:—
"The Moors.—This morning, with the break of dawn, the quick report of the rifle would be heard on all the moors of Scotland, and before this sheet is in the hands of our readers, many thousand boxes of birds will have been bagged by the keen sportsmen."
"Many thousand boxes of birds," each box containing several, will have been "bagged by the keen sportsmen;" every single bird almost out of the several thousand bagged on "the quick report of the rifle." For, you see, the rifle could not, except very rarely, kill two birds with one bullet: so that a brace of grouse dropping to the "quick report of the rifle" would be a rare occurrence. Pop goes the rifle; down goes the bird, perhaps; but that is all, in general. As the keenest sportsmen, however, sometimes miss, and rifle balls have a longish range, the sporting on these moors must have been rather dangerous to unfeathered birds as well as to game. Six shots might "achieve;" but the seventh, at least, would, in all probability, "deceive," as the British melodramatist says in Der Freischütz. But we are ourselves firing wide of our mark, or digressing from the point: which is, that the above paragraph, copied from the Stirling Journal, is evidently the production of a lady. The sex of the writer is betrayed in the vague allusion to "the rifle." A masculine scribe, with that precision in reference to shooting that cannot be expected from the female mind, would have been more specific, and would have told us whether these wonderful Scotch rifles that brought down so many grouse were Minié rifles or American revolvers.