cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life and death, and whom we delight
to see beautify her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels,
though now fantastically masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit
for her to handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the groups
round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar, chatting with prodigious
earnestness about intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest,
sympathizing at almost the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and
another's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed,
and breaking into small feminine ebullitions of spite, wrath, and
jealousy, tornadoes of a moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of her
silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a
well-bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of
good-breeding, even here. It often surprised me to witness a courtesy and
deference among these ragged folks, which, having seen it, I did not
thoroughly believe in, wondering whence it should have come. I am
persuaded, however, that there were laws of intercourse which they never
violated,--a code of the cellar, the garret, the common staircase, the
doorstep, and the pavement, which perhaps had as deep a foundation in
natural fitness as the code of the drawing-room.

Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been uttering folly in the last
two sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of
feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's novels.
For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and, for no
reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his
ears,--an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, only snatching
the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where a sharp tongue
will not serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of their
finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a