THE APPLE GIRL






<PRE>
Story printed in the 22 January edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By way of the New York Journal of Commerce

Day after day, with the regularity of a clock, a girl of fourteen,
shabbily dressed and not over clean, has brought apples for sale into
our office.

    She was here half an hour ago, and on going out a moment since,we
found her seated on the floor in the entry by a window, lost in pages of
a book which she was eagerly devouring.  "Where did you get that book?"
we inquired.  "I bought it at a stand sir."  "What is it?"  "A Fairy
book."  We smiled and walked on; thinking longer of the incident than
might at first be supposed.  She is leading a laborious life of poverty,
compared with which all our trials and troubles seem but small, and yet
in the midst of labor, she pauses and dreams the old dreams of Fairy
land, which we in our boyhood, and our fathers and their fathers, in
young days, have revelled in.  Forgetting the sounds of Wall street, the
war of carts and engines, she reads fanciful tales of Ouphes and
Spiritos, and on the floor of our entry makes a "magic circle" for Queen
Mab.  What matters to her the exchange of millions of money, or the
gigantic transactions of the street?  What if ships are laden and
unladen, fortunes made and lost?  What if newspapers are to be
published; what if the prices of the auction room disappoint the
sellers, or cotton and grain have fallen, or a steamer is below with
news of wars and revolutions?  She has no thought of all this.  She is
far removed from any effect of changes in the stock market: the storms
that shake thrones are in an atmosphere she does not aspire to; and the
thunderbolts which overturn nations, strike on mountain peaks to high
too[sic] be felt or heard by her.  Her life is in the valley yet she
leaves it, and lives another life among the beautiful creations of fancy.

    God has made none of us too low to dream and none too high.  The
same book which occupies that girl's mind on the floor, has once been
the companion of the hours of some wealthy child, as its gilded leaves
and rich covers [now stained and soiled] indicate.  The lounger on a
rich divan or a costly sofa, had the identical pleasure, none more or
less keenly, that this poor reader of fanciful stories.

    And what, after all, is the great difference between her and us?  We
all dream dreams continually, and our own ambitions are too often
schoolboy fancies, that we forget not in our lives.  We grasp at bubbles
which break in our hands, we pursue phantoms that fly before us, and
vanish only in the graveyard!

    The girl is sitting there still, but her book has dropped in her
lap, her head has fallen against the wall, one hand on the book and the
other on the floor, her bonnet is crowded somewhat over her face, but
she is father[sic] off than before from all care, for she is sound
asleep. 

 - NY Jour. of Com.

Transcriber: Marilynn Wright
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