SPARKLE. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to meet you; and now, if you’ll favor us with an act, we’ll be greatly obliged.
(_Specialties by everybody, and Finale._)
ROSANNA. This is the very garden where I used to meet my own true Sparkle. In fact, it’s right here that he used to _spark_ me. Well, while I’m feeling so downhearted, I’ll do a little dance just to cheer myself up.
SPARKLE (_entering_). What! _you_ here. Rosanna? Then you must love me.
SPARKLE (_embracing her_). Then, darling, we will be married this very day. Call the neighbors all in, and we will sing, dance, and be merry.
“Alas, Mary!” exclaimed William Sonnet, as he entered his neat but humble tenement apartment a few days before the close of Lent, “I fear that our Pfingst holiday this year will be anything but a merry one. My employers have notified me that if they receive any more complaints of the goods from my department they will give me the sack.”
William Sonnet was certainly playing in hard luck, although it would be difficult to find in the whole of Jersey City a more industrious, sober young poet, or a more devoted husband and father. For nine years he had been employed in the Empire Prose and Verse Foundry, the largest literary establishment on the banks of the Hackensack, where by sheer force of sobriety and industry he had risen from the humble position of cash-boy at the hexameter counter to that of foreman of the dialect floor, where forty-five hands were kept constantly employed on prose and verse. During these years his relations with his employers, Messrs. Rime & Reeson, had been of the pleasantest nature until about six months previous to the opening of this story, when they began--unjustly, as it seemed to him--to find fault with the goods turned out by his department. There were complaints received at the office every day, they said, of both the dialect stories and verses that bore the Empire brand.
The _Century Magazine_ had returned a large invoice of hand-sewed negro dialect verses of the “Befoh de Wah” variety, and a syndicate which supplied the Western market had canceled all its spring orders on the ground that the dialect goods had for some reason or other fallen far below the standard maintained in the other departments of the Empire Foundry. William was utterly unable to account for this change in the quality of the manuscript prepared on his floor, and as he sat with his bowed head resting on his toil-hardened hand, and the sweat and grime of honest labor on his brow, he looked, indeed, the very picture of dejection.