One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable possession.  And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its progress.

Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized, as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in the thaw of January?

How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number of coming years!  What annual the horticulturist can show will bear comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons?  And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem, stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced to the narrowest conditions of reproductive existence.  Such is the fate of the financial peau de chagrin.  Pity the poor fractional capitalist, who has just managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds.  The shears of Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long scissors which cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice of dry toast it served to flatter with oleomargarine.  Do you wonder that my thoughts took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these changes and their melancholy consequences?  If the entire poem, of several hundred lines, was “declined with thanks” by an unfeeling editor, that is no reason why you should not hear a verse or two of it.

     The peau de chagrin of state street.

        How beauteous is the bond
        In the manifold array
        Of its promises to pay,
        While the eight per cent it gives
        And the rate at which one lives
          Correspond!

        But at last the bough is bare
        Where the coupons one by one
        Through their ripening days have run,
        And the bond, a beggar now,
        Seeks investment anyhow,
          Anywhere!

The Mistress commonly contents herself with the general supervision of the company, only now and then taking an active part in the conversation.  She started a question the other evening which set some of us thinking.

“Why is it,” she said, “that there is so common and so intense a desire for poetical reputation?  It seems to me that, if I were a man, I had rather have done something worth telling of than make verses about what other people had done.”