Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1880-05-28
MISS !SOPHIA,S BABT.

Poor Miss Sophia McAllister was III despair
at finding herself growing old. She hated
age and all about it. 1t was sad and unlove-
ly and full Of unknown horrors and lack of
pleasures. Comfort and JOY and hope were
far from it. She had rather die than be-
come superannuated. She woke up every
morning with dull unspoken sense of wish
ing she had not walked at all. There was
nothing to do and nobody to do for nobody
to whose coming to look forward during the
day, or when the gloomy night fell. 1t
might rain or it might shine, it made no diff
ference. She wanted to go nowhere and
there was nobody likely to be hindered or
helped by either catastrophe from coming to
her There was nobody to come TO her, in-
deed, but her sisters and they lived a mile
away, and came only in disregard of their
husbands wishes, the husbands having
thought that Miss Sophia ought to give up
all the paternal property, and divide her
time between the households of her sisters
and Miss Sophia having insisted on her right
to her individuality, to her third Of the prop
erty, and to life by herself.
Il have always had home, Susan, said
Miss Sophia and | always mean TO have
one, if it is only four cedar poles and II blank
ct" But she peaked and pined and dwindled
in this home of hers, and began to find her
only excitement in selecting various doses
from her assortment of medicines, and in
looking for the visits Of the doctor.
The truth was that Miss Sophia was dying
of lonesomeness and ennui in this aimless
istence of hers only in the rural life there
nobody would dream of calling it ennui. As
she grew melancholy her nerves suffered, and
they in turn wrought upon her body other
wise She sometimes said that if she could
have died at once, and have been done with
it, il would not have been 80 hard but this
hanging by the eyelids" was inquisitorial,
aud on the whole there wasn't much to live
for when one had passed forty. After that
it was only treading among graves, anyway.
II one could but dry up and blow away, it
would be desirable, she said but this grow
ing old-ths gradual, open, disgusting de-
cay befOre everybodys face and eyes! Sin
gle people ought TO die, she said, sayagely
and she saw herself ceasng even to be part
of the race through lack of sympathy. 'Those
who have children" said Miss Sophia sadly,
live their youth over again in them and
need never grow old but those who have
none are no better than moving mummies
and ought to be put out of the way :" Yet
when Miss Sophia's nieces came TO see her,
they made such an uproar, and set everything
80 by the ears, as she said, that she WAS
heartily glad to have them 90 home again.
That she could take one of those children and
inOutl ntI " utE lhllC1a hGNtl chltItN hlhh
Sophia's head-very luckily for her, since, if
it had, the brothers-in-law would have seen
her in Halifax before they would have lent
her that aid and comfort aud, had it enter
ed the head of anybody else she would have
thought that person very unfeeling to imag-
inc the possibility of such II thing in her
state of health, Yet she needed, as all of us
do, something to love and forget herself in.
But she detested cats and their neighborhood
made her i'll /; she was afraid of dogs par
rot would have driven her frantic, a canary
was as bad aud as for making a pet of n
monkey, like Miss BroWnelps it was an iu-
suit to the human race. The only one thing
left her was a flock of pigeons, that she fed
outside her window Us they came flashing
and curyeting and tumbling through the air
and an immense old Shanghai rooster that
always accompanied her up and down in her
stroll on the piazza-probably for the sake
of the crumbs of the biscuit that she nibbled
as she walked.
Every year, when winter came on it SEEM
ed more and more dreary to Miss Sophia as
she looked out. The flying scud of dead
leaves the blinds taken of the opposite
house, aud the double windows put in, to
| stare her out of countenance the boats
hauled up and turned over along the shore,
with its white and frozen lip of froth-there
was desolation about it all to her, as if life
had put on its grave-clothes and the place
were the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Thanksgiving day always seemed a mockery I;
Christmas fatigue and she shivered and
ached before the thought of New Year, as if
it were only the prophecy of another twelve
month of gloom and depression. She had a
fashion, though, kept from girlhood, of
watching the new year in and the old one out
over the ashes of her fire, and going to bed
crying as the last spark vanished while com
pairing the ashes to her own life, yet feeling
that even the ashes were more blest for
that had once had life-it had once grown in
the woods, waved in the wind, shaken of the
sweet rain and silver SHOWS, glistened in the
! sun, been full of delicious scents and charm