Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1876 — A School-Girl's Performance. [ARTICLE]

A School-Girl's Performance.

Grace Wheeler is * little girl with a “ funny toe,” and with some funny ideas of life also, which have cqpt herparents a a good deni of uneasiness lately. She is only fourteen years of age, and yet she has managed sto invent and enact a very romantic little drama in real life which is as successful as “Conscience,” and a good deal more so than “ The Twins.” Following the example of one of the authors pi* the last-named play, too, she has reviewed her own performance with charming naivete in a letter to.schoolmate which is worthy of study. ■v, TSto - first .aer in G race’s drama was a police upon the stage in full uniform, and they diligently poked their clubs into all the wrong places they could find, greatly increasing the mystery and intensifying dhe iffteirest of the drama. Then Miss ;’Grace made a mysterious appearance, in the shape of a note, dated nowhere, but mailed in Jersey City. It was brief, but in proper form, and ran thus: “ Saturday, May 18,1876. “ Dear Mother- lam safe. Love to all. Shack W ueklee. ’ ’ • This of course made matters worse in the way of mystery and entanglement, and greatly encouraged the detective policemen, whose genius for skepticism promptly manifested itself in a doubt of the letter’s genuineness. With sly adroituess and the skill of their kind, they procured a “ composition*’ on silk, which the missing girl had undoubtedly written, and by comparing the handwriting of the note wltntms, satisfied themselves that Grace had written the letter, and with this slep der clew, discovered that Grace must be somewhfire. •„ After a little while the young dramatist wrote a second and longer Tetter to a schoolmate, in which she told how she had been behaving. She felt it to be her duty, she said, to confide in this especial bosom friend, and hence she related how Aggie Cassiday had one day told her that if she wanted money she could get it by procuring • a blank book and soliciting contributions in the name of the principal p£her school; how she had followed this advice and collected a dollar; how she hgd purchased a “feast” with a part of the money; how she had been accused of begging when she was only taking olf her stocking to show Maggie Smith her fuuny toe; how she had fled, and was now living with an old lady who owned a cottage ana bad no one else to live with her; and how she feared to trust even her bosom friend and present correspondent further. With this letter in hand, the astute detectives knew tvliat to do. They inquired at the intelligence offices and found out at last yhere the truant was, and triumphantly bote her to her home, after a search of ten days; and with that the curtain fell. The whole affair was apparently the result of a mere whim upon the part of a not very well-trained schoolgirl, who has much better notions of dramatic; effect than of propriety, but it is suggestive nevertheless. If we were in any way responsible for Miss Grace Wheeler’s future, we should make diligent inquiry into the nature of the literature which thatvoung lady has been in the habit ot reading, and we should not think the inquiry exhaused until we had learned which of the “sensational” periodicals printed for hoys and girls had been allowed to fall in her way. That her notions ot propriety have been affected by the reading of the sort of stories which fill the cclumjfth of, the blind-fence-placarded weeklies is as certain as any a priori conclusion can well be, and §er this la so' in her case or not, is no room to doubt the fact sriodicals of this feverish and unsome sort are read by many hunof children to their own great detriment; and parents who permit their children to read such things, whether by express warrant or by neglecting to superVise the reading of the young persons for whom they are responsible, have only themselves to biame when their sons begin to imitate the performances of “ The Boy Babdits,” or their daughters to play a part in some such drama as “ Carrie Clavering, the Countess; or, The MysteSt Disappearance.” Such stories are shed weekly, and circulate! by the red thousand, and if the evil seed they sow is allowed to fall upon the rich, Virgin soil of young minds, it is quite in the natural order that it should bear its evil fruit in due season. — N. Y. Evening Post,