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[Illustration]

  There was an old person of Crewd,
  Who said, “We use saw-dust for food;
    It’s cheap by the ton,
  And it nourishes one,
  And that’s the main object of food.”

MOLLIE’S BOYHOOD.

By Sarah E. Chester.

A little girl sat squeezed in between an old fat man and his old bony wife in a crowded hall on a sultry evening in October.  On one side it was as if feather pillows loomed above her with intent to smother; on the other, sharp elbows came into distressing contact with her ribs.  The windows were open; but the hall had not been built with reference to transmitting draughts on suffocating nights for the benefit of packed audiences; and everybody gasped for breath, though everybody fanned—­that is, everybody who had a fan, a newspaper, a hat, or a starched handkerchief.  Mollie had neither fan, newspaper, hat, nor handkerchief, and yet she of all the audience gasped unawares.  She was stifled, but happy.  Elbows and bad air might do their worst; her body suffered, but her spirit soared.  She was lifted above her neighbors, into an atmosphere where she was conscious of nothing but the eloquence that fell in such soft tones from the lips of the beautiful woman on the stage.

Mollie was fatherless and brotherless.  She had no male cousins within a thousand miles.  Her only uncle, two blocks off, was a man whose dinners rebelled against digestion, and who might have been beyond the seas for all the good he did her.  They were a feminine family,—­Mollie, her mother, the old cat and her kittens three,—­bereft of masculine rule and care, and in need of money earned by masculine hands.

The mother bore losses and lacks with the philosophy of her age; but Mollie’s age was only twelve, and knew not philosophy.  She realized that she was a mistake.  She was miserably aware that she was a mistake which could never be corrected.  Friends repeatedly assured her that it was a great pity she had not been born a boy, and tantalized her with boyhood’s possibilities.  Frequent mention was made of ways in which she might minister to her mother’s comfort if she were a son; and all Mollie’s day-dreams were visions of that gallant son’s achievements.  She used to close her eyes and see wings and bay-windows growing around their little cottage and making it a mansion; their old clothes gliding away, and fine new robes stepping into their places; strong servants working in the kitchen; pictures stealing up the walls, and luxuries scattering themselves hither and thither, till she felt the spirit of the boy within her, and seemed equal to the deeds he would have done.  Then she used to open her eyes wide to the fact of her girlhood and have little seasons of despair.