“To the stump then,” thought I. “What a glorious reform this is, after all! From being a scribbler in a small way, who knows but I may in time become the first orator in the land? Women are proverbial for tonguely gifts, and orators do not require very great depth. Like the belle with her chit-chat, it is the tone and manner which do execution. To the stump! Hur—” I didn’t finish the hurrah. I might have done so, but for a little womanly squeamishness, which could not be overcome all in a moment. Then such influences! Up started my birdie with a rustle and twitter, shaking its pretty wing, to tell me I must feed it if I would have it give me music; a “wee toddling thing” tugged at my skirt, and lisped in a way that I thought particularly bright and precocious, “take me up, sissy;” and there was many a thing about the room—the work of my own fingers, the charmed companions of holy hours—many things that laid a finger upon the lip of my spirit. There is an atmosphere hovering about the altar of a happy, love-guarded home, which—no matter! it had a very troublesome, _hush-up_ way, in my dream of the Great Reform. “I must get away from these reminiscences of past days,” said I, “before I can _whoop_ or _hurrah_ to any purpose. I will get father to take me to the city—” “_Take_ you to the city! Take you, you say! And why not take yourself there? What an arrant simpleton! I thought you would have more spirit, Fan.” “And—can I go alone?” “Alone! certainly; alone and independently. Why, everybody would laugh now-a-days to see you hanging to your father’s arm, like a child that is just learning to walk.” “Bless me, ’Bel! how could I—excellent! Then I never shall be obliged to stay at home for lack of company, but can go when and where I please. And I am not to be annoyed any more by officious collectors and captains putting themselves every half hour in my way, to know if I am ‘comfortable, Miss?’ Alone and independently! Jubilate!” “Thoughts have wings,” poets say; and they have said it so often that parrot prose has taken up the echo, and thinks the sentiment its own property. But “thoughts have wings,” nevertheless; and, at a flap of the wing of that last exultant thought, home, Cousin ’Bel, and all vanished; and I was on board a North River steamer, “alone and independent.” But did I shout “_jubilate_” now? It was the least bit in the world forlorn—that standing on the deck, with crowds of people all about me, no one caring a clay pipe-stem, whether I was happy or miserable, comfortable or suffering from fatigue and chilliness. I looked down into the water, up at the sky, gazed at the shore (rather vacantly, I must own,) and then turned to the people jostling past each other with a care-for-naught air, as though “number one is the first law of nature” had been the creed of everybody. “Independence may be a fine thing,” thought I, “no doubt it is a fine thing, but—heigho!”