True, you have the sublime gratification of flourishing your forty-dollar handkerchief of sporting your twenty-dollar “Honiton collar,” or of flaunting your thousand-dollar shawl, before the envious and admiring eyes of some weak sister, who has made the possible possession of the article in question a profound and lifetime study; you may pass, too, along the crowded _pavé_, laboring under the hallucination, that every passer-by appreciates your dry-goods value. _Not a bit of it!_ Yonder is a group of gentlemen. You pass them in your promenade; they glance carelessly at your _tout-ensemble_, but their eyes rest admiringly on a figure close behind you. It will chagrin you to learn that this locomotive loadstone has on a seventy-five cent hat, of simple straw--a dress of lawn, one shilling per yard--a twenty-five cent collar, and a shawl of the most unpretending price and fabric. All these items you take in at a glance, as you turn upon her your aristocratic eye of feminine criticism to extract, if possible, the talismanic secret of her magnetism. What is it? Let me tell you. Nature, willful dame, has an aristocracy of her own, and in one of her independent freaks has so daintily fashioned your rival’s limbs, that the meanest garb could not _mar_ a grace, nor the costliest fabric _add_ one. Compassionating her slender purse, nature has also added an artistic eye, which accepts or rejects fabrics and colors with unerring taste; hence her apparel is always well chosen and harmonious, producing the _effect_ of a rich toilet at the cost of “a mere song;” and as she sweeps majestically past, one understands why Dr. Johnson pronounced a woman to be “perfectly dressed when one could never remember what she wore.” Now, I grant you, it is very provoking to be eclipsed by a star _without a name_--moving out of the sphere of “upper-ten”-dom--a woman who never wore a “camel’s hair shawl,” or owned a diamond in her life; after the expense you have incurred, too, and the fees you have paid to Madame Pompadour and Stewart for the first choice of their Parisian fooleries. It is harrowing to the sensibilities. I appreciate the awkwardness of your position; still, my compassion jogs my invention vainly for a remedy--unless, indeed, you consent to crush such democratic presumption, by _labelling_ the astounding price of the dry-goods upon your aristocratic back. “THE OLD WOMAN.” Look into yonder window! What do you see? Nothing _new_, surely; nothing but what the angels have looked smilingly down upon since the morning stars first sang together; nothing but a loving mother hushing upon her faithful breast a wailing babe, whose little life hangs by a slender thread. Mortal lips have said, “The boy must die!”