Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

“ [334] Jones, she come home that night, and she flung her hood right down on the table, and says she, ‘There,’ says she, ‘Mr. Jones, I'm never goina to have another oa them mince pies in the house just as long as I live,’ says she. ‘There was Sammy,’ says she, ‘he was sick all last night, and I do believe it was nothina in all the world but just them mince pies,’ says she.”

“Well,” said the other lady, a slow, deliberate personage, “I do suppose that them kind of concomitants ain't good things.”

Here the conversation closed, but Mr. Weller did not feel more gratified when he heard the Bath footmen call a boiled leg of mutton a “swarry,” and wondered what they would call a roast one, than I when my poor stock of phrases was reinforced by this unexpected polysyllable. Instead of wasting so many words to describe an American railway pie, I should have described it, more tersely, as a “concomitant.”

The lecture system was long since shaken to pieces in America by the multiplying of newspapers and the growth of musical and dramatic opportunities. The “bureaus” now exist mainly for the benefit of foreign celebrities; and the American lecturer has come to concern himself more and more with questions of public policy and morals, while literature and science