ion nearly equal in steady mutual delight to the wholesome
occupation of organ-grinding. Mark the Italian nobleman who discourses
mercenary twangs beneath your window, and you shall find him a person
of severe and gloomy visage,--a figure with an expression of being
weighed down to the very earth by a something heavier than the mere
mahogany box of shrieks out of which he grinds popular misery by the
block. Not that he has a distaste for music, my boy; not that he was
the less enthusiastic at that past period "when music, heavenly maid,
was young" to him; but because the daily recurrence to his ears of
precisely the same sounds for ten years, has a horribly depressing
effect of unmitigated sameness; and music has become to him an ancient
maiden of exasperating pertinacity. It quite affects me, my boy, when I
see one of those melancholy sons of song carrying a regularly organized
monkey around with him; for it is evident he finds in such
companionship a certain relief from the anguish of monotony. Guided by
the example, I sometimes get a Brigadier to keep me company also, and
you can hardly imagine how often I am saved from gloom by the amusement
I experience in seeing his shrewd imitation of a real soldier.

But even this resource may fail; for there are periods when such
imitations are very bad indeed; and then the mind of the wearied
scribe, like that of my departed friend, the Arkansaw Nightingale, may
at any moment expire for want of food. Shall I ever forget the time, my
boy, when the Nightingale came to Washington, as President of the
Arkansaw Tract Society, for the express purpose of protesting against
the war, and procuring a fresh glass of the same he had last time?

"This war," says he, waiting for it to grow cooler, and thoughtfully
contemplating the reflection of himself in the bowl of a spoon,--"this
war, if it goes on, wont never shet pan till the hair's rubbed off the
hull country, and the 'Merican Eagle wont hev enough feathers in his
tail to oil a watch-spring. Tell you! stranger, it'll be wuss than
Tuscaloosa Sam's last tackle; and that wasn't slow."

"What was that?" says I.

"What!" says the Nightingale, stirring in a little sugar, "did you
never hearn tell of Tuscaloosa's last? Then here's the screed done into
music under my pen and seal; and as it an't quite as long's the hundred
nineteenth psalm, you don't want a chair to hear it."

Whereupon the Arkansaw Nightingale whipt from some obscure re