Give me, the old scissors, fifty bridal dresses to make rather than one shroud to prepare.
I never recovered from the chill of those dismal days, but at the end of life I can look back and feel that I have done my work well.

Other scissors have frayed and unraveled the garments they touched, but I have always made a clean path through the linen or the damask I was called to divide.

Others screeched complainingly at their toil; I smoothly worked my jaws.

Many of the fingers that wrought with me have ceased to open and shut, and my own time will soon come to die, and I shall be buried in a grave of rust amid cast-off tenpenny nails and horse-shoes.

But I have stayed long enough to testify, first, that these days are no worse than the old ones, the granddaughter now no more proud than the grandmother was; secondly, that we all need to be hammered and ground in order to take off the rust; and thirdly, that an old scissors, as well as an old man, may be scoured up and made practically useful..