under my desk, for any sudden dress emergency, as do editors their go-to-meetin' hat. Like them, too, I should have a small looking-glass for – visitors! also a bottle of – "medicine" for – visitors! I don't think I should need a safe, as the principles upon which my paper would be conducted would render it unnecessary. My object would be to amuse myself, and say just what came uppermost, not by any means to please or edify my species. Now, I have examined all the papers that cross my threshold, and I am very sure that I have hit on quite an original idea.
If it stormed badly on publication day, I wouldn't send the poor devils in my employ out with my paper, just because my subscribers fancied they wanted it. Let 'em wait. The first fair day they'd have it, of course. In the meantime, the printer's devil, and the compositors, and the rest of 'em, could play chequers till the sky cleared up.
If anybody sued me for libel, I'd – I'd whine out, "Aint you ashamed to annoy a female? Why don't you strike one of your own size?" I should insist on being treated with the deference due to a woman, though in all respects I should demand the untrammeled-seven-leagued-boots-freedom of a man. My object would be to hit everybody smack between the eyes, when I felt like it; and when I saw brutal retribution coming, to throw my silk apron over my head and whimper.
I have not yet decided upon the title of my paper. Children are not generally baptized until after they are born. Nor do I know who will stand sponsor. All that is in the misty future. As to the price, I should nail up a cash-box at the foot of the stairs, and people could drop in whatever they liked. I should, by that means, not only show my unshaken confidence in human nature, but also learn in what estimation the general public held my services. There's nothing so dear to my heart as spontaneity.
A SERMON TO PLYMOUTH PULPIT
O MR. BEECHER! that you should recommend "candy," or "sugar plums," it is all the same, for the youngsters. That you should be quoted through the length and breadth of the land as having done so, to the delight of these youngsters, and the candy-merchants, and the dentists, and the doctors generally! To be candid, I am ashamed of you.
Do you suppose that you are the only grandparent in the land? The only loving, the only proud grandparent? I am a grandparent. I can love as hard as you can. I can show just as bewildering a grandchild as you can. It is just as hard for me to say No to that grandchild as it is for you to say No to yours; but – excuse me —I can do it. She is five years old, but never touches candy. When she was three, a lady in an omnibus gave her a red and white peppermint stick, and she turned to me and asked "if it were not a pretty toy?" She knows now that candy is to eat; but when it is given her, whether in my presence or not, she says, "I am not allowed to eat candy." Meantime, she loves beefsteak, she loves potatoes, she drinks milk and eats bread, with a relish that candy-fed children never know. Either you are very right, or I am very wrong. You see I am touchy on this subject, having worn out several pens and distributed much ink in the crusade against it; and here you, in the Ledger, right under my very nose, with one frisk of your magic pen, cover me with indelible ignominy!
"Mr. Beecher says children should have candy;" and, what is more, he thinks they should be bought to be good by it! Oh, fie!
Well, now, I reply: Mr. Beecher is a man. If his grandchild has the stomach-ache, it is the women of the family who will soothe it, and bear its cries and its wakeful nights. If the little teeth prematurely decay and ache, it is the women who will accompany it to the dentist's for the heart-rending wrench of cold iron. Mr. Beecher, in short, decided this candy question from a man's standpoint. He took the popular side of the question with the children, who will always shout hosanna to him for the same. But, my dear sir, the mothers who, going home after shopping through Broadway, stop each day for the poisonous parcel of sweets for Johnny and Susy, need restraint, not encouragement, from you. They "can't imagine what ails Susy or Johnny, to be so fretful" after eating it. Of course they never for a moment suppose it to be candy. Didn't they eat candy? And are they buried yet? I ask another question: What is the state of their teeth and digestion to-day? What their powers of endurance as mothers? What, in short, do they annually contribute to enable the fat family doctor to ride in his carriage and live in Fifth Avenue? That's what I want to know.
O Mr. Beecher! well as I like you, I don't know what to say to you; and what makes the case more aggravating, I know I shall keep on liking you, whatever you say. That's the worst of it, and you know it. And I am going to send this right off to the Ledger office without a second reading, lest I should qualify it, or trim it up, or make it more respectful because you are "a minister."
No, sir; I won't do it; I'll take example by a rampant female at a public meeting the other night, who was scolding her husband for not getting her a better seat. The distressed man laid his hand on her arm, saying, "Hush! here's Fanny Fern; she will hear you." With distended nostrils, that admirable woman replied, "I don't care for six hundred Fanny Ferns!"
My dear sir, your hand is too well accustomed to drawing a moral, for me to presume to do it for you in this case! Adieu.
FEMALE CLERKS
I HAVE heard the objection made, by women, to female clerks in stores, that they are less civil and attentive to their own sex than are male clerks. I can only answer for myself, that I have never found any reason to complain of them in this regard. In fact, I often wonder at their patience and civility under very trying circumstances. I suppose gallantry supplies the place of patience in male clerks. With so many fresh, pretty, dimpled young faces to look at, a young man need not be so very churlish, though he be not christened Job.
Female clerks, it always seemed to me, must necessarily give out first in their feet. That incessant standing, from morning to night, must be more trying to them than to men. Many women, I know, can walk miles more easily than they could stand for half an hour.
After making a purchase at a store quite late in the afternoon, I said to the young girl who waited upon me, —
"How very tired you must get of us women, day after day!"
"There is a great difference in them," she civilly replied.
"But don't your feet ache sadly?" I asked. "That always seemed to me the most trying part of it."
She smiled as she pulled from under the seat, behind the counter, a stool.
"I thought that mitigation of weariness was against all regulations in stores," I replied.
"Not in this," was her answer. "Mr. – has always allowed his female clerks to sit down when they were tired."
Now, I was so pleased at this that I should like to give that employer's name in full on this page. Here was a man who was wise enough, and, above all, humane enough, to look on their side of the question. In doing so, of course, he did not overlook his own. In doing so, he may also have known that there is a point when even a woman's india-rubber patience, may be stretched too far. He may have known that, when soul and body gave out, and a customer came in at that trying moment, and the "last ounce" having been "laid on the camel's back," the article inquired for they "did not keep!" I say he might have been keen enough to have known this. I prefer to believe, that being a good, kind-hearted man, he tried to make service for these young girls as light as he would wish it made for his own young daughters, were they in that position. It is very certain that, which way soever we look at it, it is an example which other employers would do well to follow.
It wont do the male clerks any harm to stand still; but I would be very glad to have inaugurated this humane consideration for the young women. I heard one of them tell a friend, the other day, that she had to go directly to bed each evening on her return home, because her feet and
