Two of our lady friends were reading, the other day, Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon." We intended to say that the one lady was pretending to read it aloud to the other lady. No woman ever has been, now is, or ever will be, capable of listening without interrupting. So that at the very commencement when the reader read the passage,
"Nor grew it white
In a single night
As man's have grown from sudden fears—"
the readee interposed as follows: "White? How odd, to be sure. Well, I know nothing about men's hair; but there is our friend, Mrs. G——, of Twelfth-street, the lady who has been just twenty-nine years old for the last fifteen years; her husband died, you know, last winter, at which misfortune her grief was so intense that her hair turned completely black within twenty-four hours after the occurrence of that sad event."
This bit of verbal annotation satisfied us, and we withdrew.
Epitaphs are notoriously hyperbolical. It is refreshing occasionally to meet with one which is terse, business-like, and to the point. Such an one any antiquarian may find, who has the patience to hunt it out, upon the tombstone of a juvenile pilgrim father (in embryo) somewhere in the New Haven graveyard. For fear that it may not be found in the first search, we give it from memory.
"Since I so very soon was done for,
I wonder what I was begun for."