The marrowy organisms, with skins that
shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly
padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not
so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous
covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color,
and voices at once thin and strenuous,--acidulous enough to produce
effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets
with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as
sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young
persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
industrial centres, for instance,--young persons of the female sex,
we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud
strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two
or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat
apples and hand round daguerreotypes,--I say, I think the
conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not
be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition,
were he getting up a new temptation of St.
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