Your loving son,
Jonathan Slick.
[LETTER XV.]
Jonathan visits the Milliner girl—Reflections about her situation.
Dear Par:
I couldn't seem to rest easy till I went to see Susan. She boarded in a sort of a gloomy house eenamost up to Dry-dock. I knocked away at the door with my knuckles ever so long afore I could make any body hear. By-am-by Susan come to the door herself, and she took me up a pair of stairs, kivered with rag carpeting, into a leetle stived up room with a stove in it. Two leetle squalling brats were a playing on the floor, and a harnsome woman, but not over nice in her fixings, sot in one corner, a sewing on a round-about. Susan she was dressed up jest as she was in the milliner's store; she looked peaked and eenamost tuckered out, but the minit I'd got seated, she took hold with the woman and begun to sew away for dear life.
"You seem to be rather industrious," sez I.
She smiled sort of mournful, and sez she, so low I couldn't but jest ketch the words,