The Wit and Humor of America Volume I Part 25

BY JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY

Her hair was a waving bronze, and her eyes Deep wells that might cover a brooding soul; And who, till he weighed it, could ever surmise That her heart was a cinder instead of a coal!

THE BRITISH MATRON

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation, before it can quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western people cla.s.s under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but ma.s.sive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When she sits down it is on a great round s.p.a.ce of her Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much well-defined self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils, troubles, and dangers, and such st.u.r.dy capacity for trampling down a foe. Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four-gun s.h.i.+p in time of peace; for, while you a.s.sure yourself that there is no real danger, you can not help thinking how tremendous would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a hundredfold--better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fort.i.tude, and strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in society, and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy outside of the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the recollection. But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle to howl at in such an over-blown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest, slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien ma.s.s of earthliness has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, s.h.i.+elded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond can not be held to include the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? And as a matter of conscience and good morals, ought not an English married pair to insist upon the celebration of a silver wedding at the end of twenty-five years in order to legalize and mutually appropriate that corporeal growth of which both parties have individually come into possession since they were p.r.o.nounced one flesh?

THE TRAGEDY OF IT

BY ALDEN CHARLES n.o.bLE

Alas for him, alas for it, Alas for you and I!

When this I think I raise my mitt To dry my weeping eye.

STAGE WHISPERS

BY CAROLYN WELLS

Deadheads tell no tales.

Stars are stubborn things.

All's not bold that t.i.tters.

Contracts make cowards of us all.

One good turn deserves an encore.

A little actress is a dangerous thing.

It's a long skirt that has no turning.

Stars rush in where angels fear to tread.

Managers never hear any good of themselves.

A manager is known by the company he keeps.

A plot is not without honor save in comic opera.

Take care of the dance and the songs will take care of themselves.

THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE

BY JAMES T. FIELDS

My name is Esek Pettibone, and I wish to affirm in the outset that it is a good thing to be well-born. In thus connecting the mention of my name with a positive statement, I am not aware that a catastrophe lies coiled up in the juxtaposition. But I can not help writing plainly that I am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done _him_ in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway described Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, I thought the Duke felt a propensity to "hunch up some." Somehow it is pleasant to look down on the crowd and have a conscious right to do so.

Left an orphan at the tender age of four years, having no brothers or sisters to prop me round with young affections and sympathies, I fell into three pairs of hands, excellent in their way, but peculiar.

Patience, Eunice, and Mary Ann Pettibone were my aunts on my father's side. All my mother's relations kept shady when the lonely orphan looked about for protection; but Patience Pettibone, in her stately way, said,--"The boy belongs to a good family, and he shall never want while his three aunts can support him." So I went to live with my plain, but benignant protectors, in the state of New Hamps.h.i.+re.

During my boyhood the best-drilled lesson that fell to my keeping was this: "Respect yourself. We come of more than ordinary parentage.

Superior blood was probably concerned in getting up the Pettibones. Hold your head erect, and some day you shall have proof of your high lineage."

I remember once, on being told that I must not share my juvenile sports with the butcher's three little beings, I begged to know why not. Aunt Eunice looked at Patience, and Mary Ann knew what she meant.

"My child," slowly murmured the eldest sister, "our family, no doubt, came of a very old stock; perhaps we belong to the n.o.bility. Our ancestors, it is thought, came over laden with honors, and no doubt were embarra.s.sed with riches, though the latter importation has dwindled in the lapse of years. Respect yourself, and when you grow up you will not regret that your old and careful aunt did not wish you to play with the butcher's offspring."

I felt mortified that I ever had a desire to "knuckle up" with any but kings' sons, or sultans' little boys. I longed to be among my equals in the urchin line, and fly my kite with only high-born youngsters.

Thus I lived in a constant scene of self-enchantment on the part of the sisters, who a.s.sumed all the port and feeling that properly belonged to ladies of quality. Patrimonial splendor to come danced before their dim eyes; and handsome settlements, gay equipages, and a general grandeur of some sort loomed up in the future for the American branch of the House of Pettibone.

It was a life of opulent self-delusion, which my aunts were never tired of nursing; and I was too young to doubt the reality of it. All the members of our little household held up their heads, as if each said, in so many words, "There is no original sin in _our_ composition, whatever of that commodity there may be mixed up with the common clay of s...o...b..rough."

Aunt Patience was a star, and dwelt apart. Aunt Eunice looked at her through a determined pair of spectacles, and wors.h.i.+ped while she gazed.

The youngest sister lived in a dreamy state of honors to come, and had constant zoological visions of lions, griffins, and unicorns, drawn and quartered in every possible style known to the Heralds' College. The Reverend Hebrew Bullet, who used to drop in quite often and drink several compulsory gla.s.ses of home-made wine, encouraged his three parishoners in their aristocratic notions, and extolled them for what he called their "stooping-down to every-day life." He differed with the ladies of our house only on one point. He contended that the unicorn of the Bible and the rhinoceros of to-day were one and the same animal. My aunts held a different opinion.

In the sleeping-room of my Aunt Patience reposed a trunk. Often during my childish years I longed to lift the lid and spy among its contents the treasures my young fancy conjured up as lying there in state. I dared not ask to have the cover raised for my gratification, as I had often been told I was "too little" to estimate aright what that armorial box contained. "When you grow up, you shall see the inside of it," Aunt Mary used to say to me; and so I wondered, and wished, but all in vain.

I must have the virtue of _years_ before I could view the treasures of past magnificence so long entombed in that wooden sarcophagus. Once I saw the faded sisters bending over the trunk together, and, as I thought, embalming something in camphor. Curiosity impelled me to linger, but, under some pretext, I was nodded out of the room.

Although my kinswomen's means were far from ample, they determined that Swiftmouth College should have the distinction of calling me one of her sons, and accordingly I was in due time sent for preparation to a neighboring academy. Years of study and hard fare in country boarding-houses told upon my self-importance as the descendant of a great Englishman, notwithstanding all my letters from the honored three came with counsel to "respect myself and keep up the dignity of the family." Growing-up man forgets good counsel. The Arcadia of respectability is apt to give place to the levity of football and other low-toned accomplishments. The book of life, at that period, opens readily at fun and frolic, and the insignia of greatness give the school-boy no envious pangs.

I was nineteen when I entered the h.o.a.ry halls of Swiftmouth. I call them h.o.a.ry, because they had been built more than fifty years. To me they seemed uncommonly h.o.a.ry, and I snuffed antiquity in the dusty purlieus.

I now began to study, in good earnest, the wisdom of the past. I saw clearly the value of dead men and mouldy precepts, especially if the former had been entombed a thousand years, and if the latter were well done in sounding Greek and Latin. I began to reverence royal lines of deceased monarchs, and longed to connect my own name, now growing into college popularity, with some far-off mighty one who had ruled in pomp and luxury his obsequious people. The trunk in s...o...b..rough troubled my dreams. In that receptacle still slept the proof of our family distinction. "I will go," quoth I, "to the home of my aunts next vacation and there learn _how_ we became mighty, and discover precisely why we don't practice to-day our inherited claims to glory."

I went to s...o...b..rough. Aunt Patience was now anxious to lay before her impatient nephew the proof he burned to behold. But first she must explain. All the old family doc.u.ments and letters were, no doubt, destroyed in the great fire of '98, as nothing in the shape of parchment or paper implying n.o.bility had ever been discovered in s...o...b..rough, or elsewhere. _But_ there had been preserved, for many years, a suit of imperial clothes that had been worn, by their great-grandfather in England, and, no doubt, in the New World also. These garments had been carefully watched and guarded, for were they not the proof that their owner belonged to a station in life second, if second at all, to the royal court of King George itself? Precious casket, into which I was soon to have the privilege of gazing! Through how many long years these fond, foolish virgins had lighted their unflickering lamps of expectation and hope at this cherished old shrine!

I was now on my way to the family repository of all our greatness. I went up stairs "on the jump." We all knelt down before the well-preserved box; and my proud Aunt Patience, in a somewhat reverent manner, turned the key. My heart,--I am not ashamed to confess it now, although it is forty years since the quartet, in search of family honors, were on their knees that summer afternoon in s...o...b..rough,--my heart beat high. I was about to look on that which might be a duke's or an earl's regalia. And I was descended from the owner in a direct line!

I had lately been reading Shakespeare's _t.i.tus Andronicus_; and I remembered, there before the trunk, the lines:

"O sacred receptacle of my joys, Sweet cell of virtue and n.o.bility!"

The lid went up, and the sisters began to unroll the precious garments, which seemed all enshrined in aromatic gums and spices. The odor of that interior lives with me to this day; and I grow faint with the memory of that hour. With pious precision the clothes were uncovered, and at last the whole suit was laid before my expectant eyes.

Reader! I am an old man now, and have not long to walk this planet. But whatever dreadful shock may be in reserve for my declining years, I am certain I can bear it; for I went through that scene at s...o...b..rough, and still live!