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 chamberwork, 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 moulded 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 plead, 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 there were already the delicate relations of a girl who did not know that she was a woman, and a man who knew she was beautiful and worthy.  He was a man vigilant over himself, and the poverty and menial estate of Joyce Basil were already insuperable obstacles to marrying her, but still he was attracted by her insensibility that he could ever have regarded her in that light of marriage.  “Who was her father, the Judge?” he used to reflect.  The Judge was a favorite topic with Mrs. Basil at the table.

“Mr. Reybold,” she would say, “you commercial people of the Nawth can’t hunt, I believe.  Jedge Basil is now on the mountains of Fawquear hunting the plova.  His grandfather’s estate is full of plova.”