He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to his eyes as if moved .-- I was thinking,--he said indistinctly-- -- How?
What is't ?--said our landlady.
-- I was thinking--said he--who was king of England when this old pie was baked,--and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; cela va sans dire.

She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a special narrative.

There was the wooing and the wedding,--the start in life,--the disappointments,--the children she had buried,--the struggle against fate,--the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,--the broken spirits,--the altered character of the one on whom she leaned,--and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried,--not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors' grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;--such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.] Young man,--I said,--the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining.

May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet--if you are handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice.

I take it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: "Quoiqu'elle soit tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas BRUTALISER la machine."-- I will thank you for the pie, if you please.
[I took more of it than was good for me--as much as 85 degrees, I should think,--and had an indigestion in consequence.