A FERN REVERIE.
Dear me, I must go shopping. Shopping is a nuisance; clerks are impertinent; feminity is victimized. Miserable day, too; mud plastered an inch thick on the side-walk. Well, if we drop our skirts, gentlemen cry “Ugh!” and if we lift them from the mud, they level their eye-glasses at our ankles. The true definition of a gentleman (not found in incomplete Webster) is—a biped, who, of a muddy day is perfectly oblivious of anything but the shop signs.
Vive la France!Ingenious Parisians, send us over your clever invention—a chain suspended from the girdle, at the end of which is a goldhandto clasp up the superfluous length of our promenadingrobes; thus releasing our human digits, and leaving them at liberty to wrestle with rude Boreas for the possession of the detestable little sham bonnets, which the milliners persist in hanging on the backs of our necks.
Well, here we are at Call and Ketchum’s dry-goods store. Now comes the tug of war; let Job’s mantle fall on my feminine shoulders.
“Have youbluesilk?”
Yardstick, entirely ignorant of colours, after fifteen minutes of snail-like research, hands me down a silk that is asgreenas himself.
Oh! away with these stupid masculine clerks, and give uswomen, who know by intuition what we want, to the immense saving of our lungs and leather.
Here’s Mr. Timothy Tape’s establishment.
“Have you lace collars (in points), Mr. Tape?”
Mr. Tape looks beneficent, and shows me someroundedcollars. I repeat my request in the most pointed manner forpointedcollars. Mr. Tape replies, with a patronizing grin:—
“Points is going out, Ma’am.”
“So am I.”
Dear me, how tired my feet are! nevertheless, I must have some merino. So I open the door of Mr. Henry Humbug’s dry-goods store, which is about half a mile in length, and inquire for the desired article. Young Yardstick directs me to the counter at theextremeend of the store. I commence my travels thither-ward through a file of gaping clerks, and arrive there just ten minutes before two by my repeater; when I am told “they are quite out of merinos; but won’t Lyonnese cloth do just as well?” pulling down a pile of the same. I rush out in a high state of frenzy, and, taking refuge in the next-door neighbour’s, inquire for some stockings. Whereupon the clerk inquires (of the wrong customer), “What price I wish to pay?” Of course, I am not so verdant as to be caught in that trap; and, teetotally disgusted with the entire institution of shopping, I drag my weary limbs into Taylor’s new saloon to rest.
Bless me! what a display of gilding, and girls, and gingerbread!what a heap of mirrors! There’s more than oneFanny Fernin the world. I found that out since I came in.
“What will you be pleased to have?” J-u-l-i-u-s C-æ-s-a-r! look at that white aproned waiter pulling out his snuff-box and taking a pinch of snuff right over that bowl of white sugar, that will be handed me in five minutes to sweeten my tea! And there’s another combing his hair with a pocket-comb over that dish of oysters.
“What will I have?” Starve me if I’ll have anything till I can find a cleaner place than this to eat in.
Shade of old Paul Pry Boston! what do I hear? Two—well I declare, I am not sure whether they are ladies or women; I don’t understand these New York femininities. At any rate, they wear bonnets, and are telling the waiter to bring them “a bottle of Maraschino de Zara, some sponge-cake, and some brandy drops!” See them sip the cordial in their glasses, with the gusto of old topers. See their eyes sparkle and their cheeks flush, and just hear their emancipated little tongues go. Wonder if their husbands know that they—but of course they don’t. However, it is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. They are probably turning down sherry-cobblers, and eating oysters, at Florence’s; and their poor hungry children (while their parents are dainty-izing) are coming home hungry from school, to eat a fragmentary dinner picked up at home by a lazy set of servants.
Heigho! Ladies sipping wine in a public saloon! Pilgrim rock! hide yourself underground! Well, it is very shocking the number of married women who pass their time ruining their health in these saloons, devouring Parisian confectionery, and tainting their children’s blood with an appetite for strong drink. Oh, what a mockery of a home must theirs be! Heaven pity the children reared there, left to the chance training of vicious hirelings.