"'My name is Julius Jenkins, and I have a cousin named Betsey Brown; I love my cousin Betsey; have always loved my cousin Betsey, from the time when as children we tore in loving partnership our mutual pantalets and petticoats (for these legs once wore pantalets, and their symmetry was hidden from admiration by petticoats), looking for blackberries in a cedar-swamp; from the time we sucked eggs together in the barn-yard and 'teetered' in happy sport upon the same board; from the time we built playhouses in the garden and made puppy-love behind the currant bushes; from those happy days of rural felicity until the present time, my cousin Betsey has been the ideal of my soul. We used to eat bread and milk out of the same bowl, dig angleworms with the same shovel, go fishing in the same creek, steal apples from the same orchard, and crawl through the same hole in the fence when the man chased us. Through all my lonely life the memory of cousin Betsey has been my guardian angel. I have been exposed to dire temptations; once I was reduced to such extremity that I was about to earn my dinner by sawing wood, but my cousin Betsey seemed to rise before me and say, "Julius, don't degrade yourself;" and I didn't. I cast the saw to the earth, and begged my dinner from a colored washerwoman. I once accepted a situation as a clerk in a retail grocery. I stayed a week, but on every barrel of sugar, on every bar of soap, in every keg of lard, in each individual potato, in every bushel in all the cellar, I saw the reproachful face of my cousin Betsey; it rose before me from the oily depths of the butter-firkin, and from the cratery interior of the milk-can; the very peanuts rose up in judgment against me, and had on each separate end a speaking likeness of my cousin Betsey, which said, "Julius, don't degrade yourself;" I couldn't stand it; in the darkness of night I packed up my wardrobe (comprising one shirt of my own and two I borrowed from a neighboring clothes-line), helped myself to the small change, and vanished; I became a painter, I executed a portrait of my cousin Betsey; I asked a critical friend to see my masterpiece; he gazed a moment, and then asked me which was the tail end; the dolt! he thought I meant it for a pig; I wrote poetry to my cousin Betsey, but the printer returned it because I spelled Cupid with a K, and put the capitals at the wrong end of my words; the uninformed ass; he did not understand the eccentricities of genius; I became an actor, and attempted Othello; at the rise of the curtain I was saluted with a shower of onions from appreciative friends, and at its fall I was presented by the manager with a brush, to which he added his gratuitous advice that I should keep the paint on my face and go into the boot-blacking business; I turned composer, but could never get my "Bootjack Waltz" published, or my oratorio of "The Ancient Applewoman" before the public; at last my