Miss Josephine Burgess was as purty a gal as ever trod shoe leather; but she was awfully stuck up, and got into all kind of finefied notions, arter her par, the old shoemaker, died and left her his arnings. She was an awful smart critter though, and had a sort of a notion which side her bread was buttered on, as well as anybody you ever sot eyes on. Instid of spending the seven hundred dollars, which the stingy old coot of a shoemaker left behind him, all in hard chink, she sot up a milliner's and dress-maker's store in the Bowery; and it raly would have done the old chap's ghost good, to have seen how she contrived to turn the sixpences and half dollars that he'd been hoarding up so long in an old pepper-and-salt stocking, for fear of losing 'em. A tarnal snug bisness Miss Josephine Burgess was a doing, I can tell you. If she didn't know how to make things gibe, there wasn't a gal in the Bowery that did, you may be sartin. She raly had a talent for the bisness--a sort of genius in the bonnet way. With her own harnsome leetle fingers she cut and snipped and twisted and pinned on the shiney stuff and ribbons to all the caps and bonnets turned off by the ten peeked looking thin young girls that worked twelve hours out of every twenty-four, in a garret bed-room, in the back of the house, where Miss Josephine Burgess kept her store. Her thin peeked looking young girls might have enjoyed themselves if they only had a mind to! There never was such a prospect as they had to look upon when they got tired. If they jest turned their bright eyes up to get a peek at the sky, there was a hull regiment of chimnies, all a sending out smoke like a company of Florida sogers; and if they looked down, there were ever so many backyards cut up into sort of pig pens, with lots of bleech boxes a pouring out the brimstone smoke, and old straw bonnets strung out to dry, that made every thing look comfortable and like live. Miss Josephine Burgess was a purty good boss considerin. She let her gals have half an hour to eat their dinners in, and if any on 'em didn't happen to get to the shop at seven o'clock in the morning she never docked off more than half their day's wages. She was rather apt to get out of temper once in a while; but then insted of blowing the gals up, as some cross grained critters will, she only blew up their work, and made them du it all over agin; which was a more easy way of spitting out spite, and putting a few coppers into her own pocket; for when it took half of a day to du the work, and another half to alter it, she only made the poor gals lose a half day's wages; and if they didn't like that she'd al'rs give them leave to get a better place; which, considering that half the sewin gals in York are always out of work, was raly very good natured and considerate in her. Besides this she had a good many ginerous leetle ways of turning a copper. When the peeked, haggard young critters came down from the work-room, at twelve