Sing away, little bird! only you, the trees, and myself, are stirring, but you have an appreciative audience. Your sweet carol and the graceful waving of yonder tree, as the soft wind turns up its silver-lined leaves in the sunlight, fill my heart with a quiet gladness.

Whom have we here? with ragged skirt, bare mud-begrimm’d feet and ankles, tattered shawl, and tangled masses of hair fluttering round a face ploughed deep with time and trouble. See—she stoops, and, stretching her skeleton fingers towards the gutter, grasps some refuse rags and paper, and thrusts them greedily into the dirty sack she bears upon her shoulders. Good heavens! that dirty mass of rags a woman? How wearily she leans against yonder tree, gazing upward into its branches! Perhaps that little bird’s matin song has swept some chord for long years untouched in that callous heart; telling her of the shelter of a happy home, where Plenty sat at the board and Love kept guard at the threshold. Oh! who can tell? One more song, my little bird, ere she goes; not so mockingly joyous, but sweet, and soft, and low—a requiem for blighted youth and blasted hopes; for know that the blue sky to whose arch you soar, bends over misery enough to make the bright seraphs weep.

Bless me! what yell is that? “Yeei—ho—oe—yeei—ho.” It is only a milkman, and that horrid cry simply means, “Milk for sale.” What a picture of laziness is the vender! Jump off your cart, man, thump on the kitchen door with your milk-dipper, and rouse that sleepy cook who is keeping you waiting her pleasure; that’s the way to do business: pshaw! your manliness must have been diluted with your milk. One by one they emerge, the dead-and-alive looking housemaids, dragging their brooms after them lazily and helplessly, and bandy words with the vexed milkman, and gossip with each other, as they rest their chins on their broom-handles, on “kitchen cabinet” affairs.

Here comes an Italian, balancing a shelf-load of plaster Cupids and Venuses, and dove-circled vases. How mournfully his dark eyes look out from beneath his tasseled cap, as he lifts his burden from his head for a momentary reprieve. They tell of weary feet, a heavy heart, and a light purse. They tell, with a silent reproach, that our hearts are as cold as our clime. Oh! not all, good Pietro! For your sake, I’ll make myself mistress of that sleeping child; though, truth to say, the sculptor who moulded it has most wofully libelled Nature. Would I could see the sunny skies upon which your dark eyes first opened, and all the glorious forms that beauty wears in your vine-clad home beyond the seas.

How the pedestrians hurry along!—merchants to their cares and their counting-rooms, and shop-girls and seamstresses to their prisons. Here comes a group of pale-faced city children, on their way to school. God bless the little unfortunates! Their little feet should be crushing the strawberries, ripe and sweet, on some sunny hill-slope, where breath of new-mown hay and clover blossoms would give roses to their cheeks and strength and grace to their cramped and half-developed limbs. Poor little creatures! they never saw a patch of blue sky bigger than their satchels, or a blade of grass that dared to grow without permission from the mayor, aldermen and common council. Poor little skeletons! tricked out like the fashion-prints, and fed on diluted skim-milk and big dictionaries. I pity you.

OUR STREET.

A hand-organ! ground by a modern Peter Schemmel, and accompanied by a woman whose periphery it would be vain to compute by inches, singing,

Ye gods and graces! if ye heed her prayer, grant that she alight not on my two-lips! Now she is warbling,

as if she wasn’t making it for me, this minute, a perfect place of torment! Avaunt! thou libel upon feminity!—creep into corduroys and apply for the office of town crier.

A funeral! That is nothing uncommon in a densely populated city; so, nobody turns to look, as it winds along, slowly, as will the sad future to that young husband—that father of an hour. Sad legacy to him, those piles of tiny robes, and dainty little garments, whose elaborate and delicate embroidery was purchased at such a fearful price. Nature will have her revenge for a reckless disregard of her laws: so, there she lies, the young mother, with the long-looked-for babe upon her girlish breast. Sad comment upon a foolish vanity.

What have we here?—A carriage at the door? Ah! I recollect; there was a wedding at that house last night—lights flashing, music swelling—white arms gleaming through tissue textures, and merry voices breaking in upon my slumbers late in the small hours.

Ah yes—and this is the bride’s leave-taking. How proud and important that young husband looks, as he stands on the steps, with the bride’s traveling shawl upon his arm, giving his orders to the coachman! Now he casts an impatient glance back through the open door into the hall, half jealous of the tear sparkling in the young wife’s eye, as the mother presses her tenderly to her breast, as the father lays the hand of blessing on her sunny head, and brothers and sisters, half glad, half sad, offer their lips for a good-bye kiss.

Hurry her not away! Not even the heart she has singled out from all the world to lean upon, can love so fondly, so truly, as those she leaves behind. Dark days may come, when love’s sunshine shall be o’erclouded by cares and sickness, from which young manhood, impatient, shrinks. Let her linger: so shall your faith in her young wifely love be strengthened by such strong filial yearning for these, her cradle watchers. Let her linger: silver hairs mingle in the mother’s tresses; the father’s dark eye grows dim with age, and insatiate Death heeds nor prayer, nor tear, nor lifted eye of supplication. Let her linger.

New-York! New-York! who but thyself would have tolerated for twelve mortal hours, with the thermometer at 90 degrees, that barrel of refuse fish and potatoes, sour bread and damaged meat, questionable vegetables and antique puddings, steaming on that sunny sidewalk, in the forlorn hope that some pig’s patron might be tempted, by the odoriferous hash, to venture on its transportation. Know, then, O pestiferous Gotham, that half a score of these gentry, after having sounded it with a long pole to the bottom, for the benefit of my olfactories, have voted it a nuisance to which even a pig might make a gutter-al remonstrance. Oh! Marshal Tukey, if California yet holds you, in the name of the Asiatic cholera, and my “American constitution,” recross the Isthmus and exorcise that barrel!

Look on yonder door-step. See that poor, worn creature seated there, with a puling infant at her breast, from whence it draws no sustenance: on either side are two little creatures, apparently asleep, with their heads in her lap. Their faces are very pallid, and their little limbs have nothing of childhood’s rounded symmetry and beauty. “Perhaps she is an impostor,” says Prudence, seizing my purse-strings, “getting up that tableau for just such impressible dupes as yourself.” “Perhaps she is not,” says Feeling; “perhaps at this moment despair whispers in her tempted ear ‘curse God and die!’ Oh! then, how sad to have ‘passed her by, on the other side!’” Let me be “duped,” rather than that wan face should come between my soul and Heaven.