SOLILOQUY OF MR. BROADBRIM.
“There’s another of Miss Fiddlestick’s articles! She’s getting too conceited, that young woman! Just like all newly-fledged writers—mistakes a few obscure newspaper puffs for the voice of the crowd, and considers herself on the top round of the literary ladder. It will take me to take the wind out of her sails. I’ll dissect her, before I’m a day older, as sure as my name is Ezekiel Broadbrim. I don’t approve her style; never did. It’s astonishing to me that the editor of The Green Twig dare countenance it, when he knows a man of my influence could annihilate her with one stroke of my pen. She has talent of a certain inferior order, but nothing to speak of. She’s an unsafe model to follow; will lead her tribe of imitators into tremendous mistakes. It’s a religious duty for a conspicuous sentinel, like myself, on Zion’s walls, to sound the blast of alarm;—can’t answer it to my conscience to be silent any longer. It might be misconstrued. The welfare of the world in general, and her soul in particular, requires a very decided expression of my disapprobation. I’m sorry to annihilate her, but when Ezekiel Broadbrim makes up his mind what is the path of duty, a bright seraph couldn’t stop him. Perhaps I may pour a drop of the balm of consolation afterwards, but it depends altogether upon whether I succeed in bringing her into a penitential frame of mind. It’s my private opinion she is an incorrigible sinner. Hand me my pen, John. Every stroke of it will tell.”
WILLY GREY.
A stern, unyielding, line-and-plummet, May-flower descendant, was old Farmer Grey, of Allantown, Connecticut. Many a crop had he planted, many a harvest had he garnered in, since he first became owner of Glen Farm. During that time, that respected individual, “the oldest inhabitant,” could not remember ever to have seen him smile. The village children shied close to the stone wall, and gave him a wide berth, when he passed. Even the cats and dogs laid their ears back, and crept circumspectly by him, with one eye on his whip-lash.
Farmer Grey considered it acceptable to the God who painted the rainbow, and expanded the lily, and tinted the rose, to walk the bright earth with his head bowed like a bulrush, and his soul clad in sackcloth. No mercy fell from the lips of his imaginary Saviour; no compassion breathed in His voice; no love beamed in His eye; His sword of justice was never sheathed.
The old farmer’s wife was a gentle, dependent creature, a delicate vine, springing up in a sterile soil, reaching forth its tendrils vainly, for some object to cling to. God, in his mercy, twined them lovingly around a human blossom. Little Willy partook of his mother’s sensitive, poetical nature. A yearning spirit looked out from the fathomless depths of his earnest eyes. Only eight short summers the gentle mother soothed her boy’s childish pains, and watched his childish slumbers. While he grew in strength and beauty, her eye waxed dim, and her step grew slow and feeble.
And so sweet memories were only left to little Willy,—dear, loving eyes, whose glance ever met his on waking; a fair, caressing hand, that wiped away his April tears; a low, gentle voice, sweet to his childish ear as a seraph’s hymning.