brightest,
stillest, and withal such a smiling little lady!

If you had held her up by the window,--for she could not hold up
herself,--she would have hung like a porcelain transparency in your
hands. And if you had said, laying her gently down, and giving the tears
a smart dash, that they should not fall on her lifted face, "Poor
child!" the Lady of Shalott would have said, "O, don't!" and smiled. And
you would have smiled yourself, for very surprise that she should outdo
you; and between the two there would have been so much smiling done that
one would have fairly thought it was a delightful thing to live last
summer in an attic at the east end of South Street.

This perhaps was the more natural in the Lady of Shalott because she had
never lived anywhere else.

When the Lady of Shalott was five years old, her mother threw her down
stairs one day, by mistake, instead of the whiskey-jug.

This is a fact which I think Mr. Tennyson has omitted to mention in his
poem.

They picked up the Lady of Shalott and put her on the bed; and there she
lay from that day until last summer, unless, as I said, somebody had
occasion to use her for a transparency.

The mother and the jug both went down the stairs together a few years
after, and never came up at all,--and that was a great convenience, for
the Lady of Shalott's palace in the attic was not large, and they took
up much unnecessary room.

Since that the Lady of Shalott had lived with her sister, Sary Jane.

Sary Jane made nankeen vests, at sixteen and three quarters cents a
dozen.

Sary Jane had red hair, and crooked shoulders, and a voice so much like
a rat-trap which she sometimes set on the stairs that the Lady of
Shalott could seldom tell which was which until she had thought about it
a little while. When there was a rat caught, she was apt to ask "What?"
and when Sary Jane spoke, she more often than not said, "There's
another!"

Her crooked shoulders Sary Jane had acquired from sitting under the
eaves of the palace to sew. That physiological problem was simple. There
was not room enough under the eaves to sit straight.

Sary Jane's red hair was the result of sitting in the sun on July noons
under those eaves, to see to thread her needle. There was no question
about that. The Lady of Shalott had settled it in her own mind, past
dispute. Sary Jane's hair had been--what was it? brown? once. Sary Jane
was slowly taking fire. Who would not, to sit in the sun in th