The Poet at the Breakfast-Table eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 410 pages of information about The Poet at the Breakfast-Table.

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 410 pages of information about The Poet at the Breakfast-Table.

The Landlady’s announcement of her intention to give up keeping boarders was heard with regret by all who met around her table.  The Member of the Haouse inquired of me whether I could tell him if the Lamb Tahvern was kept well abaout these times.  He knew that members from his place used to stop there, but he hadn’t heerd much abaout it of late years.  I had to inform him that that fold of rural innocence had long ceased offering its hospitalities to the legislative, flock.  He found refuge at last, I have learned, in a great public house in the northern section of the city, where, as he said, the folks all went up stairs in a rat-trap, and the last I heard of him was looking out of his somewhat elevated attic-window in a northwesterly direction in hopes that he might perhaps get a sight of the Grand Monadnock, a mountain in New Hampshire which I have myself seen from the top of Bunker Hill Monument.

The Member of the Haouse seems to have been more in a hurry to find a new resting-place than the other boarders.  By the first of January, however, our whole company was scattered, never to meet again around the board where we had been so long together.

The Lady moved to the house where she had passed many of her prosperous years.  It had been occupied by a rich family who had taken it nearly as it stood, and as the pictures had been dusted regularly, and the books had never been handled, she found everything in many respects as she had left it, and in some points improved, for the rich people did not know what else to do, and so they spent money without stint on their house and its adornments, by all of which she could not help profiting.  I do not choose to give the street and number of the house where she lives, but a-great many poor people know very well where it is, and as a matter of course the rich ones roll up to her door in their carriages by the dozen every fine Monday while anybody is in town.

It is whispered that our two young folks are to be married before another season, and that the Lady has asked them to come and stay with her for a while.  Our Scheherezade is to write no more stories.  It is astonishing to see what a change for the better in her aspect a few weeks of brain-rest and heart’s ease have wrought in her.  I doubt very much whether she ever returns to literary labor.  The work itself was almost heart-breaking, but the effect upon her of the sneers and cynical insolences of the literary rough who came at her in mask and brass knuckles was to give her what I fear will be a lifelong disgust against any writing for the public, especially in any of the periodicals.  I am not sorry that she should stop writing, but I am sorry that she should have been silenced in such a rude way.  I doubt, too, whether the Young Astronomer will pass the rest of his life in hunting for comets and planets.  I think he has found an attraction that will call him down from the celestial luminaries to a light

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The Poet at the Breakfast-Table from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.