Who'd sell a young woman must work it up smart:
Or else, like the planter, whose story I've told,
He'll only go selling to find himself sold.
When I had finished singing, Captain Samyule Sa-mith exhibited a small manuscript, and says he:
"The noise having ceased, I will proceed to read a small moral tale, written by a young woman which lives in Boston, and is destined to become an eddycator of mankind. The fiction is called
"MR. SMITH.[1 ]
"The first of April. You know the day. A point of time, an unit of twenty-four hours, with a night on each side of it, and the sun laid on top to keep it in its place. You have undoubtedly passed the day in New England at some period of your miserable life. You have felt your coarse nature repulsed, too, when some weary and desolate little child has dreamily pinned a bit of paper to the hinder-most verge of the garment men call a coat, and then called the attention of passers-by to your appearance. You have despised that little, weary, hollow-eyed child for it. Beware how you strike that child; for I tell you that the child is the germ of the thing they call man. The germ will develop; it will grow broadly and largely into the full entity of Manhood. In striking the present Child you strike the future Man. Ponder this thought well. Let it fester in your bosom.
"John Smith sat at his table, in the lowest depths of a dreamy coal-mine, and helped himself to some more pork and beans. I know not what there was way down in the black recesses of the man's hidden soul to make him want so much pork and beans. I look into my heart to find an answer to the question, but no answer comes. Providence does not reveal all things to us. Is it not well it should be so?
"He was a hard, iron-looking, adamantine man. His eyes were glowing furnaces for the crucibles of thought. You felt that he saw you when he looked at you. His nose was like a red gothic tower built amidst broken angles of sullied snow, and his mouth was the cellar of that tower. His hair was of the sort that resists a comb. You have seen the same sort on the heads of men of great thought. It is the tangled bush in which the goat of Thought loses itself.
"John Smith hiccupped, as he helped himself to some more pork and beans. He did not notice that the foot which he had semi-consciously placed on a pale, sickly child, was beginning to move. But it did move, and there crawled from under it the shape of a diseased dwarf of womanhood. This timid, pallid thing, uplifted itself to its bleeding feet, and nestled to the side of John Smith.