my shoes at a dolly shop and gone gadding the hoof,
without a doss to sleep on--a town pauper, done on the vag--than to
have been made scurvy in the sight of that child and deserve his words
of shame!"

He threw his head upon the table and burst into tears.

II--HASH

Mrs. Tryphonia Basil kept a boarding-house of the usual kind on
Four-and-a-Half Street. Male clerks--there were no female clerks in the
Government in 1854--to the number of half a dozen, two old bureau
officers, an architect's assistant, Reybold, and certain temporary
visitors made up the table. The landlady was the mistress; the slave
was Joyce.

Joyce Basil was a fine-looking girl, who did not know it--a fact so
astounding as to be fitly related only in fiction. She did not know it,
because she had to work so hard for the boarders and her mother. Loving
her mother with the whole of her affection, she had suffered all the
pains and penalties of love from that repository. She was to-day
upbraided for her want of coquetry and neatness; to-morrow, for
proposing to desert her mother and elope with a person she had never
thought of. The mainstay of the establishment, she was not aware of her
usefulness. Accepting every complaint and outbreak as if she deserved
it, the poor girl lived at the capital a beautiful scullion, an
unsalaried domestic, and daily forwarded the food to the table, led in
the chamber work, rose from bed unrested and retired with all her bones
aching. But she was of a natural grace that hard work could not make
awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though no
more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest
thrown forward, her back like the torso of a Venus de Milo, her head
placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child molded in
the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes--very long,
excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so
imperfectly that once Reybold had seen it drop like a cloud around her
and nearly touch her feet. At that moment, seeing him, she blushed. He
pleaded, for once, a Congressman's impudence, and without her objection
wound that great crown of woman's glory around her head, and as he did
so, the perfection of her form and skin, and the overrunning health and
height of the Virginia girl, struck him so thoroughly that he said:

"Miss Joyce, I don't wonder that Virginia is the mother of Presidents."

Between Reybold and Joyce ther