"It's well you didn't," sez the milliner, and with that she went down stairs, and the poor tuckered out young critters didn't get hum to supper till ten o'clock at night, because they had to stay and finish off Miss Josephine Burgess's ball finery. Miss Josephine Burgess was a sitting in the leetle room up over her store, ready dressed for the ball, when the little apprentice gal cum up and told her, that the gentleman from over the way was a waiting down stairs. The milliner jumped up and began to wriggle about afore the looking glass to be sartin that the red velvet frock, the golden chain, and the heap of posies that she'd twistified in her hair, were all according to gunter. Arter she'd took a purty gineral survey, she went down stairs about the darndest stuck up critter that you ever sot eyes on. The 'pothecary stood afore the looking glass a trying to coax his hair to curl a leetle, and a pulling up fust one side of his white satin stock and then t'other, to make it set up parpendicular. He'd got a leetle speck of dirt on his silk stockings and his shiney dancing pumps, a coming across the street, so he took his white hankercher out of his pocket and began to dust them off; but the minit Miss Josephine Burgess cum in he stopped short, stepped back agin the wall, and held up both hands as if he raly didn't know what to du with himself, and sez he-- "I never did! Talk about the Venus de Medici, or the New York beauty! Did ever anything come up to that are?" Arter this bust of feeling, he gin a spring fore'd and ketching her hand, eenamost eat it up, he kissed so consarned eager. It didn't seem as if there was any contenting the darn'd love-sick coot. But when he hung on too hard, the milliner's vartuous indignation begun to bile up, and so he choked off and begged her pardon; but said he couldn't help it, as true as the world he couldn't, his heart was brim full and a running over.