"'Three breaths!' how absurd! as if people, when they get excited, ever have any breath, or if they have are conscious of it. I should like to see the Solomon who got off that sage maxim. I should like better still, to give him an opportunity to test his own theory! It's very refreshing to see how good people can be, when they have no temptation to sin; how they can sit down and make a code of laws for the world in general and sinners in particular.
"'Three breaths!' I wouldn't give a three-cent piece for anybody who is that long about anything. The days of stage coaches have gone by. If you ever noticed it, nobody passes muster now but comets, locomotives, and telegraph wires. Our forefathers and foremothers would have to hold the hair on their heads if they should wake up in 1855. They'd be as crazy as a cat in a shower bath, at all our whizzing and rushing. Nice old snails! it's a question with me whether I should have crept on at their pace if I had been a cotemporary. Christopher Columbus would have discovered the New World much quicker than he did had I been at his elbow."
LXXVIII.
THE EARLY BLIGHT.—BY FANNY FERN.
"'As Love's wild prayer, dissolved in air,
Her woman's heart gave way,—
But the sin forgiven, by Christ in Heaven—
By man is curs't alway.'
"'Oh, do not speak so harshly of her, Aunt Nancy! If you could see how sorrowfully she looks upon that beautiful boy—how she starts at the sound of a strange voice—how hopelessly she sits with her large eyes fixed upon the ground, hour after hour,—so young and so beautiful, too!'
"'Yes, yes,' broke in Aunt Nancy; 'I dare say! they're always beautiful. I tell you there's no mercy for her in this world, or t'other, as I knows on,' and the indignant spinster drew up her long crane neck. 'Why didn't she behave as she oughter? Did you ever hear a word said against me? Beauty is nothing; behavior is everything.'