Australian Tales - Setis

papers would soften their criticisms, in these suffering times, if they
missed the usual force, sparkle, and point in the leading columns; and
how many would sigh commiseratingly over the probability of those
ideas having flowed from the aching brains of the writers as vapidly as
mouldy ink from a rusty pen? How many persons in that sneezing
congregation, yesterday, pitied the poor suffering parson in the pulpit, as
he laboured to make his misty syllogisms as clear as sunlight. How many
considerate souls sympathised with their worthy pastor's swollen nose,
and awed down their smirks when he called “Moses” Boses, or when he
languidly told them “to udite id siggig the didty-didth psalb.” And what
proportion of the hearers went home complaining that the sermon was
“not up to the mark,” compared with those who generously reflected how
arduously their dispirited minister had toiled, for the last few days, to
urge his flagging brain to its duties, and to think out that forty-five
minutes sermon.
Then again, I wondered if sympathy was active enough in mercantile
circles? Whether that merchant would pardon his drowsy clerk, for
making a few blunders in that complicated account-current? and whether
that master draper, (who was rather cross because customers had been
scarce lately,) would debit Influenza with the failure of his shivering
shopman to persuade that strong-minded old lady to buy a “shepherd's
plaid scarf,” instead of a “M'Gregor tartan shawl,” which was not in their
stock? I thought a little too, about milliners' girls, and hard-working girls
in general; many of whom have to please ill and irritable mistresses, and
to look pleasantly at troublesome customers, while their interesting little
noses look as mottled as blighted mazarine cherries. Then I began to
commiserate schoolmasters and mistresses, and to wonder how they
preserved their patience, amidst their hosts of little snifflers; but I
suddenly remembered that it was holiday season, and that all those
liberated ladies and gentlemen would probably be in bed; so I began to
envy them, until I was seized with a fit of sneezing, which made me
forget everything but my own discomfort, and created a mental
uneasiness lest I should sneeze my hat off into the muddy street, and
have a long chase after it; for the wind was gusty, and running after my
hat is an exercise to which I am not at all partial.
During one of the brief intervals of sunshine, last week, I ventured out
of doors again, for an hour — muffled up to the nose like a Norway
skipper — and in that short time I saw enough to keep my sympathies in
exercise to the present moment. Of course I condoled with the two
unlucky ladies, who slipped down, opposite to the celebrated Doctor's
door, and woefully bedaubed their dresses and their kid gloves with
whity-brown mud. Though I was not near enough to help them up again,
I felt for their discomfiture, but I could not indorse their ungenerous
insinuation, “that the doctor aforesaid, had pipeclayed his pathway to