—­I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps That Boy’s questions about the simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind of significance as the Master’s inquiries into the Order of Things.

—­On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries about him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied sources of comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable.  The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,—­perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco.  As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more about him.

—­The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can hardly be more than nineteen or twenty years old.  I wish I could paint her so as to interest others as much as she does me.  But she has not a profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster, and a cheek where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their old quarrel with alternating victory.  Her hair is brown, her cheek is delicately pallid, her forehead is too ample for a ball-room beauty’s.  A single faint line between the eyebrows is the record of long—­continued anxious efforts to please in the task she has chosen, or rather which has been forced upon her.  It is the same line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers who has visited us; the same which is so striking on the masks of singing women painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,—­that Himalayan home of harmony which you are to see and then die, if you don’t live where you can see and hear it often.  Many deaths have happened in a neighboring large city from that well-known complaint, Icterus Invidiosorum, after returning from a visit to the Music Hall.  The invariable symptom of a fatal attack is the Risus Sardonicus.—­But the Young Girl.  She gets her living by writing stories for a newspaper.  Every week she furnishes a new story.  If her head aches or her heart is heavy, so that she does not come to time with her story, she falls behindhand and has to live on credit.  It sounds well enough to say that “she supports herself by her pen,” but her lot is a trying one; it repeats the doom of the Danaides.  The “Weekly Bucket” has no bottom, and it is her business to help fill it.  Imagine for one moment what it is to tell a tale that must flow on, flow ever, without pausing; the lover miserable and happy this week, to begin miserable again next week and end as before; the villain scowling, plotting, punished; to scowl, plot, and get punished again in our next; an endless series of woes and busses, into each paragraph of which the forlorn artist has to throw all the liveliness, all the emotion, all the graces of style she is mistress of, for the wages of