It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not making himself heard is earning his money; but, on the other hand, it may be asked if he is not less regrettable for that reason. A great many good people do not earn their money, and yet by universal consent they seem to have a right to it. We cannot oblige the poor to earn their money, any more than the rich, without attacking the principle on which society is based, and classing ourselves with its enemies. If people get money out of other people, we ought not to ask how they get it, whether it is much or little; and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the honesty of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will I question the gains of those silentious minstrels who grind small, mute organs at the corners of the pavement, with a little tin cup beside them to receive tribute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively anything. How they can sit upon the cold stone all day long without taking their deaths, passes me to say; and I am inclined to think that they do really earn their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments of human endurance. The average American grandmother would sneeze in five seconds, under the same conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. But these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or wet, light or dark. One night I came upon one sleeping on her curbstone,--such a small, dull wad of out-worn womanhood!--her gray old head bent upon her knees, and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. It was very chill that night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her trying to imagine her short and simple annals; a dim, far-off childhood in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains--the whole round of woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this last result of houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more--if, indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! I sighed, as people of feeling used to do in the eighteenth century, and dropped a dime into the tin cup. The sound startled the beldame, and I hope that before she woke and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and luxury for the rest of her life. “_Bella musica!_” I said, with a fine irony, and she smiled and shrugged, and began to feel for the handle of her organ, as if she were willing to begin giving me my money’s worth on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day how impossible they would seem! V.