chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and
incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its
progress.

Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized,
as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in
the thaw of January?

How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number of
coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has flowered
in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons? And now the
last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem, stripped of its
ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced to the narrowest
conditions of reproductive existence. Such is the fate of the financial
peau de chagrin. Pity the poor fractional capitalist, who has just
managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds. The shears of
Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long scissors which
cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice of dry toast it
served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder that my thoughts
took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these changes and their
melancholy consequences? If the entire poem, of several hundred lines,
was "declined with thanks" by an unfeeling editor, that is no reason why
you should not hear a verse or two of it.

THE PEAU DE CHAGRIN OF STATE STREET.