Fern Fanny
Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio.
OUR STREET
Sing away, little bird! only you, the trees, and myself, are stirring, but you have an appreciative audience. Your sweet carol and the graceful waving of yonder tree, as the soft wind turns up its silver-lined leaves in the sunlight, fill my heart with a quiet gladness.
Whom have we here? with ragged skirt, bare mud-begrimm’d feet and ankles, tattered shawl, and tangled masses of hair fluttering round a face ploughed deep with time and trouble. See – she stoops, and, stretching her skeleton fingers towards the gutter, grasps some refuse rags and paper, and thrusts them greedily into the dirty sack she bears upon her shoulders. Good heavens! that dirty mass of rags a woman? How wearily she leans against yonder tree, gazing upward into its branches! Perhaps that little bird’s matin song has swept some chord for long years untouched in that callous heart; telling her of the shelter of a happy home, where Plenty sat at the board and Love kept guard at the threshold. Oh! who can tell? One more song, my little bird, ere she goes; not so mockingly joyous, but sweet, and soft, and low – a requiem for blighted youth and blasted hopes; for know that the blue sky to whose arch you soar, bends over misery enough to make the bright seraphs weep.
Bless me! what yell is that? “Yeei – ho – oe – yeei – ho.” It is only a milkman, and that horrid cry simply means, “Milk for sale.” What a picture of laziness is the vender! Jump off your cart, man, thump on the kitchen door with your milk-dipper, and rouse that sleepy cook who is keeping you waiting her pleasure; that’s the way to do business: pshaw! your manliness must have been diluted with your milk. One by one they emerge, the dead-and-alive looking housemaids, dragging their brooms after them lazily and helplessly, and bandy words with the vexed milkman, and gossip with each other, as they rest their chins on their broom-handles, on “kitchen cabinet” affairs.
Here comes an Italian, balancing a shelf-load of plaster Cupids and Venuses, and dove-circled vases. How mournfully his dark eyes look out from beneath his tasseled cap, as he lifts his burden from his head for a momentary reprieve. They tell of weary feet, a heavy heart, and a light purse. They tell, with a silent reproach, that our hearts are as cold as our clime. Oh! not all, good Pietro! For your sake, I’ll make myself mistress of that sleeping child; though, truth to say, the sculptor who moulded it has most wofully libelled Nature. Would I could see the sunny skies upon which your dark eyes first opened, and all the glorious forms that beauty wears in your vine-clad home beyond the seas.
How the pedestrians hurry along! – merchants to their cares and their counting-rooms, and shop-girls and seamstresses to their prisons. Here comes a group of pale-faced city children, on their way to school. God bless the little unfortunates! Their little feet should be crushing the strawberries, ripe and sweet, on some sunny hill-slope, where breath of new-mown hay and clover blossoms would give roses to their cheeks and strength and grace to their cramped and half-developed limbs. Poor little creatures! they never saw a patch of blue sky bigger than their satchels, or a blade of grass that dared to grow without permission from the mayor, aldermen and common council. Poor little skeletons! tricked out like the fashion-prints, and fed on diluted skim-milk and big dictionaries. I pity you.
A hand-organ! ground by a modern Peter Schemmel, and accompanied by a woman whose periphery it would be vain to compute by inches, singing,
“I’d be a butterfly.”
Ye gods and graces! if ye heed her prayer, grant that she alight not on my two-lips! Now she is warbling, as if she wasn’t making it for me, this minute, a perfect place of torment! Avaunt! thou libel upon feminity! – creep into corduroys and apply for the office of town crier.
“Home! sweet home,”
A funeral! That is nothing uncommon in a densely populated city; so, nobody turns to look, as it winds along, slowly, as will the sad future to that young husband – that father of an hour. Sad legacy to him, those piles of tiny robes, and dainty little garments, whose elaborate and delicate embroidery was purchased at such a fearful price. Nature will have her revenge for a reckless disregard of her laws: so, there she lies, the young mother, with the long-looked-for babe upon her girlish breast. Sad comment upon a foolish vanity.
What have we here? – A carriage at the door? Ah! I recollect; there was a wedding at that house last night – lights flashing, music swelling – white arms gleaming through tissue textures, and merry voices breaking in upon my slumbers late in the small hours.
Ah yes – and this is the bride’s leave-taking. How proud and important that young husband looks, as he stands on the steps, with the bride’s traveling shawl upon his arm, giving his orders to the coachman! Now he casts an impatient glance back through the open door into the hall, half jealous of the tear sparkling in the young wife’s eye, as the mother presses her tenderly to her breast, as the father lays the hand of blessing on her sunny head, and brothers and sisters, half glad, half sad, offer their lips for a good-bye kiss.
Hurry her not away! Not even the heart she has singled out from all the world to lean upon, can love so fondly, so truly, as those she leaves behind. Dark days may come, when love’s sunshine shall be o’erclouded by cares and sickness, from which young manhood, impatient, shrinks. Let her linger: so shall your faith in her young wifely love be strengthened by such strong filial yearning for these, her cradle watchers. Let her linger: silver hairs mingle in the mother’s tresses; the father’s dark eye grows dim with age, and insatiate Death heeds nor prayer, nor tear, nor lifted eye of supplication. Let her linger.
New-York! New-York! who but thyself would have tolerated for twelve mortal hours, with the thermometer at 90 degrees, that barrel of refuse fish and potatoes, sour bread and damaged meat, questionable vegetables and antique puddings, steaming on that sunny sidewalk, in the forlorn hope that some pig’s patron might be tempted, by the odoriferous hash, to venture on its transportation. Know, then, O pestiferous Gotham, that half a score of these gentry, after having sounded it with a long pole to the bottom, for the benefit of my olfactories, have voted it a nuisance to which even a pig might make a gutter-al remonstrance. Oh! Marshal Tukey, if California yet holds you, in the name of the Asiatic cholera, and my “American constitution,” recross the Isthmus and exorcise that barrel!
Look on yonder door-step. See that poor, worn creature seated there, with a puling infant at her breast, from whence it draws no sustenance: on either side are two little creatures, apparently asleep, with their heads in her lap. Their faces are very pallid, and their little limbs have nothing of childhood’s rounded symmetry and beauty. “Perhaps she is an impostor,” says Prudence, seizing my purse-strings, “getting up that tableau for just such impressible dupes as yourself.” “Perhaps she is not,” says Feeling; “perhaps at this moment despair whispers in her tempted ear ‘curse God and die!’ Oh! then, how sad to have ‘passed her by, on the other side!’” Let me be “duped,” rather than that wan face should come between my soul and Heaven.
WHEN YOU ARE ANGRY
“When you are angry, take three breaths before you speak.”
I couldn’t do it, said Mrs. Penlimmon. Long before that time I should be as placid as an oyster. “Three breaths!” I could double Cape Horn in that time. I’m telegraphic, – if I had to stop to reflect, I should never be saucy. I can’t hold anger any more than an April sky can retain showers; the first thing I know, the sun is shining. You may laugh, but that’s better than one of your foggy dispositions, drizzling drops of discomfort a month on a stretch; no computing whether you’ll have anything but gray clouds overhead the rest of your life. No: a good heavy clap of thunder for me – a lightning flash; then a bright blue sky and a clear atmosphere, and I am ready for the first flower that springs up in my path.
“Three breaths!” how absurd! as if people, when they get excited, ever have any breath, or if they have, are conscious of it. I should like to see the Solomon who got off that sage maxim. I should like better still to give him an opportunity to test his own theory! It’s very refreshing to see how good people can be, when they have no temptation to sin; how they can sit down and make a code of laws for the world in general and sinners in particular.
“Three breaths!” I wouldn’t give a three-cent piece for anybody who is that long about anything. The days of stage coaches have gone by. Nothing passes muster now but comets, locomotives and telegraph wires. Our forefathers and foremothers would have to hold the hair on their heads if they should wake up in 1854. They’d be as crazy as a cat in a shower-bath, at all our whizzing and rushing. Nice old snails! It’s a question with me whether I should have crept on at their pace, had I been a cotemporary. Christopher Columbus would have discovered the New World much quicker than he did, had I been at his elbow.
LITTLE BESSIE; OR, MISS PRIM’S MODEL SCHOOL
School is out! What stretching of limbs; what unfettering of tongues and heels; what tossing-up of pinafores and primers; what visions of marbles, and hoops, and dolls, and apples, and candy, and gingerbread! How welcome the fresh air; how bright the sunshine; how tempting the grassy playground! Ah, there’s a drop of rain – there’s another; there’s a thunder clap! “Just as school is out – how provoking!” echo a score of voices; and the pouting little prisoners huddle together in the school-house porch, and console themselves by swapping jack-knives and humming tops, and telling marvellous stories of gypsies and giants; while Miss Prim, the dyspeptic teacher, shakes her head and the ferule, and declares that the former will “fly into fifty pieces;” upon which some of the boys steal out of doors and amuse themselves by sounding the puddles with their shoes, while others slyly whittle the desks, or draw caricatures on their slates, of Miss Prim’s long nose.
Drip, drip – spatter, spatter! How the rain comes down, as if it couldn’t help it; no prospect of “holding up.”
Here come messengers from anxious mothers, with India rubbers, extra tippets, and umbrellas; and there’s a chaise at the door, for Squire Lenox’s little rosy daughter; and a wagon for the two Prince girls; and a stout Irish girl, with a blanket shawl, to carry home little lame Minnie May, who is as fragile as a lily, and just as sweet. And there’s a servant man for Master Simpkins, the fat dunce with the embroidered jacket, whose father owns “the big Hotel, and wishes his son to have a seat all by himself.”
And now they are all gone; – all save little Bessie Bell, the new scholar, – a little four-year-older, who is doing penance over in the corner for “a misdemeanor.”
Bessie’s mother is a widow. She has known such bright, sunny days, in the shelter of a happy home, with a dear arm to lean upon! Now, her sweet face is sad and care-worn, and when she speaks, her voice has a heart-quiver in it: but, somehow, when she talks to you, you do not notice that her dress is faded, or her bonnet shabby and rusty. You instinctively touch your hat to her, and treat her very courteously, as if she were a fine lady.
As I said before, this is little Bessie’s first day at school; for, she is light and warmth and sunshine to her broken-hearted mother. But, little Bessie must have bread to eat. A shop woman offered her mother a small pittance to come and help her a part of every day; but she is not to bring her child; so, Bessie must go to school, to be out of harm’s way, and her mother tells Miss Prim, as she seats her on the hard bench, that “she is very timid and tender-hearted;” and then she kisses Bessie’s little quivering lip, and leaves her with a heavy heart.
Bessie dare not look up for a few minutes; – it is all very odd and strange, and if she were not so frightened she would cry aloud. By-and-by she gains a little courage, and peeps out from beneath her drooping eye-lashes. Her little pinafore neighbor gives her a sweet smile – it makes her little heart so happy, that she throws her little dimpled arms about her neck and says, (out loud) “I love you!”
Poor, affectionate little Bessie! she didn’t know that that was a “misdemeanor;” nor had she ever seen that bug-bear, a “School Committe.” Miss Prim had; – and Miss Prim never wasted her lungs talking; so, she leisurely untied her black silk apron from her virgin waist, and proceeded to make an African of little Bessie, by pinning it tightly over her face and head – an invention which herself and “the Committe” considered the ne plus ultra of discipline. Bessie struggled, and said she “never would kiss anybody again – never – never;” but Miss Prim was inexorable, and, as her victim continued to utter smothered cries, Miss Prim told her “that she would keep her after the other children had gone home.”
One class after another recited; Bessie’s sobs became less loud and frequent, and Miss Prim flattered herself, now that they had ceased altogether, that she was quite subdued, and congratulated herself complacently upon her extraordinary talent for “breaking in new beginners.”
And now, school being done, the children gone, her bonnet and India rubbers being put on, and all her spinster “fixings” settled to her mind, visions of hot tea and buttered toast began to float temptingly through her brain, and suggest the propriety of Bessie’s release.
“Bessie!” – no answer. “Bessie!” – no reply. Miss Prim laid the ferule across the little fat shoulders. Bessie didn’t wince. Miss Prim unpinned the apron to confront the face that was bold enough to defy her and “the Committee.” Little Bessie was dead!
Well; there was a pauper funeral, and a report about that a child had been “frightened to death at school;” but Bessie’s mother was a poor woman, consequently the righteous Committee “didn’t feel called upon to interfere with such idle reports.”
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 infinitessimal 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 was a highwayman; (or to find yourself transported with rage, at finding it transported 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 possible that is your friend, Miss Grey?”
It is to be ushered into the “best chamber,” (always a north one) of a cold January night; to unhook your dress with stiffened digits; to find every thing in your trunk but your night-cap; to creep between polished linen sheets, on a congealed mattress, 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 your pro tem. latitude; to have somebody forever at your nervous elbow, trying to make you “enjoy yourself;” to laugh when you want to cry; to be loquacious 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!
HELEN HAVEN’S “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”
“I’m miserable; there’s no denying it,” said Helen. “There’s nothing in this endless fashionable routine of dressing, dancing and visiting, that can satisfy me. Hearts enough are laid at my feet, but I owe them all to the accidents of wealth and position. The world seems all emptiness to me. There must be something beyond this, else why this ceaseless reaching of the soul for some unseen good? Why do the silent voices of nature so thrill me? Why do the holy stars with their burning eyes utter such silent reproaches? Have I nothing to do but amuse myself with toys like a child? Shall I live only for myself? Does not the sun that rises upon my luxury, shine also upon the tear-stained face of sorrow? Are there not slender feet stumbling wearily in rugged, lonely paths? Why is mine flower-bestrewn? How am I better? Whose sorrowful heart have I lightened? What word of comfort has fallen from my lips on the ear of the grief-stricken? What am I here for? What is my mission?”
“And you have only this wretched place to nurse that sick child in?” said Helen; “and five lesser ones to care for? Will you trust that sick child with me?”
“She is not long for this world, my lady; and I love her as well as though I had but one. Sometimes I’ve thought the more care I have for her, the closer my heart clings to her. She is very patient and sweet.”
“Yes, I know,” said Helen; “but I have it in my power to make her so much more comfortable. It may preserve, at least lengthen her life.”
When little Mary opened her eyes the next morning, she half believed herself in fairy-land. Soft fleecy curtains were looped about her head, her little emaciated hand rested upon a silken coverlid, a gilded table stood by her bed-side, the little cup from which her lips were moistened was of bright silver, and a sweet face was bending over her, shaded by a cloud of golden hair, that fell like a glory about her head.
“Where am I?” said the child, crossing her little hand across her bewildered brain.
Helen smiled. “You are my little bird now, dear. How do you like your cage?”
“It is very, very pretty,” said Mary, with childish delight; “but won’t you get tired of waiting upon a poor little sick girl? Mamma was used to it. You don’t look as if you could work.”
“Don’t I?” said Helen, with a slight blush; “for all that, you’ll see how nicely I can take care of you, little one. I’ll sing to you; I’ll read to you; I’ll tell you pretty stories; and when you are weary of your couch, I’ll fold you in my arms, and rock you so gently to sleep. And when you get better and stronger, you shall have so many nice toys to play with, and I’ll crown your little bright head with pretty flowers, and make you nice little dresses; and now I’m going to read to you. Betty has been out, and bought you a little fairy story about a wonderful puss; and here’s ‘Little Timothy Pip;’ which will you have?”
“Mamma used to read to me out of the Bible,” said little Mary, as her long lashes swept her cheek.
Helen started; a bright crimson flush passed over her face, and bending low, she kissed the child’s forehead reverentially.
“About the crucifixion, please,” said Mary, as Helen seated herself by her side.
That Holy Book! Helen felt as if her hands were “unclean.” She began to read; perhaps the print might not have been clear; but she stopped often, and drew her small hand across her eyes. Her voice grew tremulous. Years of worldliness had come between her and that sad, touching story. It came upon her now with startling force and freshness. Earth, with its puerile cares and pleasures, dwindled to a point. Oh, what “cross” had her shoulders borne? What “crown of thorns” had pierced her brows? How had her careless feet turned aside from the footsteps of Calvary’s meek sufferer!
“Thank you,” said little Mary, rousing Helen from her reverie; “mamma used to pray to God to make me patient, and take me to Heaven.”
Tears started to Helen’s eyes. How could she tell that sinless little one she knew not how to pray? Ah! she was the pupil, Mary the teacher! Laying her cheek to hers, she said in a soft whisper, “Pray for us both, dear Mary.”
With sweet, touching, simple eloquence that little silvery voice floated on the air! The little emaciated hand upon which Helen’s face was pressed, was wet with tears —happy tears! Oh, this was what that restless soul had craved! Here at “the cross,” that world-fettered spirit should plume itself for an angel’s ceaseless flight. Aye, and a little child had led “her” there!
Adolph Grey wandered listlessly through that brilliant ball-room. There were sweet voices, and sweeter faces, and graceful, floating forms; but his eye rested on none of them.
“Pray, where is Lady Helen?” said he, wandering up to his gay hostess, with a slight shade of embarrassment.
“Ah, you may well ask that! I’m so vexed at her! Every man in the room is as savage as a New Zealander. She has turned Methodist, that’s all. Just imagine; our peerless Helen thumbing greasy hymn-books at vestry meetings, listening to whining preachers, and hunting up poor dirty beggar children! I declare, I thought she had too much good sense. Well, there it is; and you may as well hang your harp on the willows. She’ll have nothing to say to you now; for you know you are a sinner, Grey.”
“Very true,” said Grey, as he went into the ante-room to cloak himself for a call upon Helen; “I am a sinner; but if any woman can make a saint of me, it is Lady Helen. I have looked upon women only as toys to pass away the time; but under that gay exterior of Helen’s there was always something to which my better nature bowed in reverence. ‘A Methodist,’ is she? Well, be it so. She has a soul above yonder frivolity, and I respect her for it.”
If in after years the great moral questions of the day had more interest for Adolph Grey than the pleasures of the turf, the billiard room, or the wine party, who shall say that Lady Helen’s influence was not a blessed one?
Oh, if woman’s beauty, and power, and witchery were oftener used for a high and holy purpose, how many who now bend a careless knee at her shrine, would hush the light laugh and irreverent jest, and almost feel, as she passed, that an angel’s wing had rustled by!
