Life — November 18, 1886 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HELLO! THERE'S A CAT. HERE'S FOR SPORT. SOLD AGaIN. enchanting representation of the lay figure on which dresses are first tried in the big establishments. They tell me that you were perfectly wooden, and that one woman in the audi- ence exclaimed that she would like to stick a needle in you to see ifit would make you move naturally. What a compli- ment to art! My sister, I have said that I am not envious of you. Well, Iam not. But to be so deliciously wooden — mais n’en parlons plus! Sister, if there are any other of my réles you would like to appear in, I will cheerfully sanction your interpretation. Would you like Marguerite, Gautier, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Fedora or Theodora? \can picture the exquisite novelty of your appearance in Fedora. Tha réle has been continually played by myself in Paris, Mrs. Bernard Beere in London, and Miss Fanny Davenport in New York. Take it, dear, and be your own silly little wooden, awkward self in it, Let me hear from you on the subject. I am devoured with im- patience. En attendant. Je t'embrasse comme une sceur, SARAH BERNHARDT. P. S.— One day I hope-that together we can star. THE LADY’S MAID. RENCH Ninette, my lady's maid, Would you tell, if richly paid, All that I should like to know,— If my lady's cheeks do grow Warmly red when she doth bend O’er the roses that I send, And if she but feigns to find Love so little to her mind ; Would you tell me if by art Some new suitor sways her heart, And if that’s the reason why She is ever cold and shy. Nay, Ninette, I will not ask Lest too well you do your task, And when your quick tongue doth go Tell much more than I would know, Tell of many a scene and word Best unnoticed, best unheard,— For no woman, if well weighed, Seems an angel to her maid. F. S. Palmer, THE GHOST OF GRASSMERE. | LOOKING like Alexander Selkirk— Monarch of all he surveyed — | Gregory Smallpins stood by the waters’ edge tracing out with the finger’s-end of imagination the almost illegible line of Sandy Hook. On a narrow neck, a stone’s throw on his right—its crumbling founda- tions washed by the waves—stood a weather-worn wooden house. No, smoke-wreathed chimney surmounted it, no honey-suckle porch sut- rounded it, and the wide open door hanging by one rusted hinge trav- estied welcome : hospitable or hostile, no sight or sound met eye or ear. A pile of crumbling bricks, broken plaster and worm-eaten boards to its window-sills in the sands it stood —a melancholy symbol of life and light departed. It was the haunted house, and the Monarch of all he surveyed boldly entered. The stairs groaned beneath his weight and the infirmities of age, threatening his every step with calamity ; but he reached the top in safety, and knew, instinctively, that he stood on the very threshold of the innermost sanctum, The room was hung with the hermit spiders’ artistic tapestries ; immense black beetles, lone- some looking rat-holes and mystery abounded ; the only living things seemed to be himself and the Goliah-like insects that stared at him with fierce and undisguised surprise, and only the breaking waters without broke the stillness, If there had been lacking a solitary element of the mysterious, the close-shut closet-door confronting him amply supplied that element. It was shut! and the longer he considered why that door was shut when all the rest were wide open, the more unaccounta- ble it seemed to him to be, and the more certain he became that he had better let it alone; but the lonesome grain of courage that had some- how not filtered its way down into his boots suddenly coalesced with curiosity, and he flung open the door. Smallpins is a tolerably level-headed young man. He is notmuch in the habit of making idle assertions, or indulging in reckless denuncia- tion, and, it is not at all improbable, therefore, that he truly believed he but echoed the voice of his sternest convictions whenever he express- ed—as he had been wont todo most unspairingly — his unbounded con- tempt for all things appertaining to the supernatural. But when he opened that mysterious door—he saw—nothing! A black bottom- less hole yawned before him; he heard—nothing! the imprisoned silence came out like a wave; a wave that drowned in a fathomless swirl the beating of his heart and the hoarse roar of the ocean. Dread premonition stole upon him, benumbing his senses, pulverizing the in- finitesmal grain before mentioned, and dissipating the last drop of cu- riosity as though it were a corpuscle of dew in the midday sun, With a haughty nonchalance, however, he was reaching for the knob—for he felt that he must close that door, or die before turning his back upon it — when the loud and sudden squeak of a loose board beneath his foot stopped his pulses as effectually as though their delicate mechanism had been tumbled upon by a fourteen-story flat building ; but it accel- erated his movements astonishingly, and he laid hold of the door so impetuously that everything rattled from cellar to garrety His head- long intention thereupon had been to escape; but the stout stick— with which he had armed himself upon entering —dexterously entangled comicbooks.com