THE DELIGHTS OF VISITING.
What is it to go away on a visit? Well, it is to take leave of the little velvet rocking-chair, which adjusts itself so nicely to your shoulders and spinal column; to cram, jam, squeeze, and otherwise compress your personal effects into an infinitesimal compass; to be shook, jolted, and tossed, by turns, in carriage, railroad and steamboat; to be deafened with the stentorian lungs of cab-drivers, draymen, and porters; to clutch your baggage as if every face you saw were a highwayman (or to find yourself transported with rage, at findingittransported by steam to Greenland or Cape Horn). It is to reach your friend’s house, travel-stained, cold and weary, with an unbecoming crook in your bonnet; to be utterly unable to get the frost out of your tongue, or “the beam into your eye,” and to have the felicity of hearing some strange guest remark to your friend, as you say an early good-night, “Is it possibleTHATis your friend, Miss Grey?”
It is to be ushered into the “best chamber” (always anorthone) of a cold January night; to unhook your dress with stiffened digits; to find everything in your trunkbutyour nightcap; to creep between polishedlinensheets, on a congealedmattress, and listen to the chattering of your own teeth until daylight.
It is to talk at a mark twelve hours on the stretch; to eat and drink all sorts of things which disagree with you; to get up sham fits of enthusiasm at trifles; to learn to yawn circumspectly behind your finger-tips; to avoid all allusion to topics unsuited to yourpro tem. latitude; to have somebody for ever at your nervous elbow,trying to make you “enjoy yourself;”to laugh when you want to cry; to beloquacious when you had rather be taciturn; to have mind and body in unyielding harness, for lingering, consecutive weeks; and then to invite your friends, with a hypocritical smile, to play the same farce over with you, “whenever business or pleasure calls them” to Frog-town!