those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal disorder into
their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors and
shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession and march under similar banners of
disease; but among them we may observe here and there a sickly
student, who has left his health between the leaves of classic
volumes; and clerks, likewise, who have caught their deaths on
high official stools; and men of genius too, who have written
sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their heart's blood. These
are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But what is this
cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear with
the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now
it is almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud.
Consumption points their place in the procession. With their sad
sisterhood are intermingled many youthful maidens who have
sickened in aristocratic mansions, and for whose aid science has
unavailingly searched its volumes, and whom breathless love has
watched. In our ranks the rich maiden and the poor seamstress may
walk arm in arm. We might find innumerable other instances, where
the bond of mutual disease--not to speak of nation-sweeping
pestilence--embraces high and low, and makes the king a brother
of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease is the
natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the
color of a fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their
own physical infirmities, and display their symptoms as the
badges of high station. All things considered, these are as
proper subjects of human pride as any relations of human rank