As for Sallie, you would scarcely know her. She is no longer cross with care and quarrelsome with hunger. I always did believe that prosperity was good for the human soul, and Sallie Morrison proves the theory. She has grown sweet tempered in its sunshine, is gentle and forbearing to her children, loving and grateful to her father-in-law, and her husband's heart trusts in her.
Therefore let all those fortunate ones who are in prosperity give cheerfully to those who ask of them. It will bring a ten-fold blessing on what remains, and the piece of silver sent out on its pleasant errand may happily touch the hand that shall bring the giver good fortune through all the years of life.
Tom Duffan's cabinet-pictures are charming bits of painting; but you would cease to wonder how he caught such delicate home touches if you saw the room he painted in; for Tom has a habit of turning his wife's parlor into a studio, and both parlor and pictures are the better for the habit.
One bright morning in the winter of 1872 he had got his easel into a comfortable light between the blazing fire and the window, and was busily painting. His cheery little wife--pretty enough in spite of her thirty-seven years--was reading the interesting items in the morning papers to him, and between them he sung softly to himself the favorite tenor song of his favorite opera. But the singing always stopped when the reading began; and so politics and personals, murders and music, dramas and divorces kept continually interrupting the musical despair of "Ah! che la morte ognora."
But even a morning paper is not universally interesting, and in the very middle of an elaborate criticism on tragedy and Edwin Booth, the parlor door partially opened, and a lovelier picture than ever Tom Duffan painted stood in the aperture--a piquant, brown-eyed girl, in a morning gown of scarlet opera flannel, and a perfect cloud of wavy black hair falling around her.
"Mamma, if anything on earth can interest you that is not in a newspaper, I should like to know whether crimps or curls are most becoming with my new seal-skin set."
"If I was a picture, of course papa would know; but seeing I am only a poor live girl, it does not interest him."