The Grinder Papers — page 78: what you’re looking at

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

THE GRINDER PAPERS. 73 cent creature mzme some day, fancy what the pride of my heart must be. And now, though I intended to write anonymously, I find I must give you my real name. I am Florabella Alice Elizabe- thina Perkins. I wouldn’t for the world have you fancy I might be Miss Sourgrapes, to whom Horace Billiwinkle never paid the least attention that could have been regarded as serious by any sen- sible peason. I am the idol of his heart. I know it, for he has told me so fifty times. And though Perkins zs a common name compared with Billiwinkle, and my grandfather was a shoemaker, and it was only his great-grandfather'ss father who kept a junk shop, and sold rags, and bottles, and things, we are on a par now, and who cares for ancestors so long as they re not publicly mentioned ? There has been, I admit, a coldness between the families since that wretch of a cousin of ma’s, Miss Charity Grinder, in- troduced a number of awful people into our parlors at a party we gave, and would talk about poor, shoemaking, respectable grandpa. She should have felt sympathy instead. Mrs. Billi- winkle should; for though the junk shop man died too long azo to be dragged into conversation, I don’t believe /e was re- spectable, and went to church, and all that. In fact, Mrs. Crampton Codfish says human bones were found in his shop after his decease. Poor old Mrs. Crampton Codfish, she needn’t talk, for though it’s ages agzo—as much longer before the junk man as the junk Eomicboo cS (E(0)