But wealth has its little eccentricities and we must bear with them. But he alone is indeed rich who is content and who does not look under the bed every night for an indictment. Look at poor old Mr. Sharp, with his stock of Aldermen depreciating on his hands—men for whom he paid a big price only a few years ago and who would not attract attention now on a ten-cent counter, while he don't feel very well himself.
No, I would not swap places with J. Sharp and ride through Central Park behind a pair of rip, snorting horses, with mourning rosettes on their heads, and feel that I must hurry back to help select an unprejudiced jury. I would rather hang on to the brow of a Broadway car till I got to Fifty-second street, and then stroll over to the menagerie and feed red pepper to the Sacred Cow and have a good, plain, quiet time than to wear fine clothes and be wealthy and hate myself all the time. I believe that I am happier in my untroubled, dreamless sleep on my quiet couch, which draws a salary during the daytime as an upright piano; happier browsing about at a different restaurant each day, so that the waiters will not get well acquainted with me and expect me to give them the money that I am saving up to go to Europe with; happier, I say, to be thus tossed about on the bosom of the great, heaving human tide than to have forty or fifty millions of dollars concealed about my person that I cannot remember how I obtained.
I dislike notoriety, and nothing irritates me more than the coarse curiosity of people who ride at night in the elevated trains and peer idly into my room as I toil over my sewing or go gayly about humming a simple air as I prepare the evening meal over my cute little portable oil stove, and though I have not courted this interest on the part of the people, and though I would prefer to live less in the eye of the public, I feel that, occupying the position I do, I cannot expect to wholly consult my own wishes in the matter, and I am content to live quietly and enjoy good health rather than wear good clothes and feel rocky all the time.
I would rather have a healthy alimentary
Than he garnished all over with passementerie.
LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD.
WHEN Patrick Henry put his old cast-iron spectacles on the top of his head and whooped for liberty, he did not know that some day we would have more of it than we knew what to do with. He little dreamed that the time would come when we would have more liberty than we could pay for. When Mr. Henry sawed the air and shouted for liberty or death, I do not believe that he knew the time would one day come when Liberty would stand knee deep in the mud of Bedloe's Island and yearn for a solid place to stand upon.
It seems to me that we have too much liberty in this country in some ways. We have more liberty than we have money. We guarantee that every man in America shall fill himself up full of liberty at our expense, and the less of an American he is the more liberty he can have. If he desires to enjoy himself, all he needs is a slight foreign accent and a willingness to mix up with politics as soon as he can get his baggage off the steamer. The more I study American institutions the more I regret that I was not born a foreigner, so that I could have something to say about the management of our great land. If I could not be a foreigner, I believe I would prefer to be a Mormon or an Indian not taxed.