the ballads, I came upon a certain production entitled, I think, “The Fire Zouave,” and was struck with the truly patriotic and American manner in which “Zouave” was made to rhyme in different stanzas with “grave, brave, save, and glaive.”  As I purchased it at once, with a gratified expression of countenance, it soon became evident that the act was misconstrued by my poor friend, who from that moment never ceased to haunt me.  Perhaps in the whole course of her precarious existence she had never before sold a ballad.  My solitary purchase evidently made me, in her eyes, a customer, and in a measure exalted her vocation; so thereafter she regularly used to look in at my door, with a chirping, confident air, and the question, “Any more songs to-day?” as though it were some necessary article of daily consumption.  I never took any more of her songs, although that circumstance did not shake her faith in my literary taste; my abstinence from this exciting mental pabulum being probably ascribed to charitable motives.  She was finally absorbed by the S. F. B. A., who have probably made a proper disposition of her effects.  She was a little old woman, of Celtic origin, predisposed to melancholy, and looking as if she had read most of her ballads.

My next reminiscence takes the shape of a very seedy individual, who had, for three or four years, been vainly attempting to get back to his relatives in Illinois, where sympathizing friends and a comfortable almshouse awaited him.  Only a few dollars, he informed me,—­the uncontributed remainder of the amount necessary to purchase a steerage ticket,—­stood in his way.  These last few dollars seem to have been most difficult to get, and he had wandered about, a sort of antithetical Flying Dutchman, forever putting to sea, yet never getting away from shore.  He was a “49-er,” and had recently been blown up in a tunnel, or had fallen down a shaft, I forget which.  This sad accident obliged him to use large quantities of whiskey as a liniment, which, he informed me, occasioned the mild fragrance which his garments exhaled.  Though belonging to the same class, he was not to be confounded with the unfortunate miner who could not get back to his claim without pecuniary assistance, or the desolate Italian, who hopelessly handed you a document in a foreign language, very much bethumbed and illegible,—­which, in your ignorance of the tongue, you couldn’t help suspiciously feeling might have been a price current, but which you could see was proffered as an excuse for alms.  Indeed, whenever any stranger handed me, without speaking, an open document, which bore the marks of having been carried in the greasy lining of a hat, I always felt safe in giving him a quarter and dismissing him without further questioning.  I always noticed that these circular letters, when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy, and that they all seem to have been written by the same hand.  Perhaps indigence exercises a peculiar and equal effect upon the handwriting.