Leaden before, my eyes were dross of lead.

I was pale and lank, but things had settled themselves in my mind:  I had gone back to my old ideas of honor and freedom; my mind was made up.

“Well, Lydia,” said I, “you wanted to manage:  you were bound to wear the breeches.  As you make your pants, so you must sit in them.”

“You awful man!” said she.

“Now I will manage,” said I.

“Indeed!  Nothing would please me better,” said she.

“I will sell our house and all that’s in it, and get out of debt,” said I.

“You mean to be one of the lower classes and wear old rags,” she exclaimed.

“We have no class-distinctions but the Saving Class and the Wasting Class.  I shall be of the first class.  As to clothes, they are despicable,” I replied.

“People who despise clothes can’t get any.”

“Well, I’ve done all I’m going to do toward developing the West, which consists in getting into debt, as far as I can see.”

When an able woman submits she submits completely.  Lydia put our house in order.  I filled the streets with dodgers advertising our sale.  I have not been a paragraphist for nothing:  the sale was a success.  I paid a part of my debts, and gave notes for the rest that will keep my future poor.  I started in again on the Times’ city force.  To board I hate:  it’s a chicken’s life—­roosting on a perch, coming down to eat and then going back to roost.  So I got a little domicile in “The Patch.”  When the teakettle has begun to spend the evening the new cheap wallpaper, the whitewash and the soapsuds with which the floor has been scrubbed emit peculiar odors.

“It smells poor-folksy here,” says Lydia.

“All the better!” say I. 
                         —­MARY DEAN.

SHORT STUDIES IN THE PICTURESQUE.

Although our American climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests, in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its hills and mountains there is that which makes an English Midland landscape seem tame in comparison.  The rapid changes of temperature in summer and the sudden rising of vast masses of heated air produce cloud-structures of the most imposing description, especially huge, irregular cumulus clouds that float in equilibrium above us like colossal icebergs, airy mountain-ranges or tottering battlemented towers and “looming bastions fringed with fire.”

  Yon clouds are big with flame, and not with rain,
    Massed on the marvellous heaven in splendid pyres,
  Whereon ethereal genii, half in pain
    And half in triumph, light their mystic fires.