Fern Fanny
Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio.
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 gold hand to clasp up the superfluous length of our promenading robes; 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 & Ketchum’s dry-goods store. Now comes the tug of war: let Job’s mantle fall on my feminine shoulders.
“Have you blue silk?”
Yardstick, entirely ignorant of colors, after fifteen minutes of snail-like research, hands me down a silk that is as green as himself.
Oh! away with these stupid masculine clerks, and give us women, 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 some rounded collars. I repeat my request in the most pointed manner for pointed collars. 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 the extreme end of the store. I commence my travels thitherward 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 neighbor’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 one Fanny Fern in the world. I found that out since I came in.
“What will you be pleased to have?” Julius Cæsar! 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 feminities). 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 an old toper. 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 under-ground! Well, it is very shocking the number of married women who pass their time ruining their health in these saloons, devouring Parisian confectionary, 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.
APOLLO HYACINTH
“There is no better test of moral excellence, than the keenness of one’s sense, and the depth of one’s love, of all that is beautiful.” —Donohue.
I don’t endorse that sentiment. I am acquainted with Apollo Hyacinth. I have read his prose, and I have read his poetry; and I have cried over both, till my heart was as soft as my head, and my eyes were as red as a rabbit’s. I have listened to him in public, when he was, by turns, witty, sparkling, satirical, pathetic, till I could have added a codicil to my will, and left him all my worldly possessions; and possibly you have done the same. He has, perhaps, grasped you cordially by the hand, and, with a beaming smile, urged you, in his musical voice, to “call on him and Mrs. Hyacinth;” and you have called: but, did you ever find him “in?” You have invited him to visit you, and have received a “gratified acceptance,” in his elegant chirography; but, did he ever come? He has borrowed money of you, in the most elegant manner possible; and, as he deposited it in his beautiful purse, he has assured you, in the choicest and most happily chosen language, that he “should never forget your kindness;” but, did he ever pay?
Should you die to-morrow, Apollo would write a poetical obituary notice of you, which would raise the price of pocket-handkerchiefs; but should your widow call on him in the course of a month, to solicit his patronage to open a school, she would be told “he was out of town,” and that it was “quite uncertain when he would return.”
Apollo has a large circle of relatives; but his “keenness of perception, and deep love, of the beautiful” are so great, that none of them exactly meet his views. His “moral excellence,” however, does not prevent his making the most of them. He has a way of dodging them adroitly, when they call for a reciprocation, either in a business or a social way; or, if, at any time, there is a necessity for inviting them to his house, he does it when he is at his country residence, where their greenness will not be out of place.
Apollo never says an uncivil thing – never; he prides himself on that, as well as on his perfect knowledge of human nature; therefore, his sins are all sins of omission. His tastes are very exquisite, and his nature peculiarly sensitive; consequently, he cannot bear trouble. He will tell you, in his elegant way, that trouble “annoys” him, that it “bores” him; in short, that it unfits him for life – for business; so, should you hear that a friend or relative of his, even a brother or a sister, was in distress, or persecuted in any manner, you could not do Apollo a greater injury (in his estimation) than to inform him of the fact. It would so grate upon his sensitive spirit, – it would so “annoy” him; whereas, did he not hear of it until the friend, or brother, or sister, were relieved or buried, he could manage the matter with his usual urbanity and without the slightest draught upon his exquisitely sensitive nature, by simply writing a pathetic and elegant note, expressing the keenest regret at not having known “all about it” in time to have “flown to the assistance of his dear” – &c.
Apollo prefers friends who can stand grief and annoyance, as a rhinoceros can stand flies – friends who can bear their own troubles and all his – friends who will stand between him and everything disagreeable in life, and never ask anything in return. To such friends he clings with the most touching tenacity – as long as he can use them; but let their good name be assailed, let misfortune once overtake them, and his “moral excellence” compels him, at once, to ignore their existence, until they have been extricated from all their troubles, and it has become perfectly safe and advantageous for him to renew the acquaintance.
Apollo is keenly alive to the advantages of social position, (not having always enjoyed them;) and so, his Litany reads after this wise: From all questionable, unfashionable, unpresentable, and vulgar persons, Good Lord, deliver us!
SPOILED LITTLE BOY
“Boo-hoo! – I’ve eaten so – m-much bee-eef and t-turkey, that I can’t eat any p-p-plum p-p-pudding!”
Miserable little Pitcher! Take your fists out of your eyes, and know that thousands of grown-up pinafore graduates, are in the same Slough of Despond with your epicurean Lilliputian-ship. Having washed the platter clean of every crumb of “common fixins,” they are left with cloyed, but tantalizing desires, for the spectacle of some mocking “plum pudding.”
“Can’t eat your pudding!”
Why, you precious, graceless young glutton! you have the start of me, by many an ache-r. I expect to furnish an appetite for every “plum pudding” the fates are kind enough to cook for me, from this time till Teba Napoleon writes my epitaph.
Infatuated little Pitcher! come sit on my knee, and take a little advice. Don’t you know you should only take a nibble out of each dish, and be parsimonious at that; always leaving off, be the morsel ever so dainty, before your little jacket buttons begin to tighten; while from some of the dishes, you should not even lift the cover; taking aunt Fanny’s word for it, that their spicy and stimulating contents will only give you a pain under your apron. Bless your little soul, life’s “bill of fare” can be spun out as ingeniously as a cobweb, if you only understand it; and then you can sit in the corner, in good digestive order, and catch your flies! But if you once get a surfeit of a dainty, it takes the form of a pill to you, ever after, unless the knowing cuisinier disguise it under some novel process of sugaring; and sadder still, if you exhaust yourself in the gratification of gross appetites, you will be bereft of your faculties for enjoying the pure and heavenly delights which “Our Father” has provided as a dessert for his children.
A “BROWN STUDY” – SUGGESTED BY BROWN VAILS
“Why will ladies wear those ugly brown vails, which look like the burnt edge of a buckwheat cake? We vote for green ones.” —Exchange.
Mr. Critic: Why don’t you hit upon something objectionable? Such as the passion which stout ladies have for wearing immense plaids, and whole stories of flounces! Such as thin, bolster-like looking females wearing narrow stripes! Such as brunettes, gliding round like ghosts, in pale blue! Such as blondes blowing out like dandelions in bright yellow! Such as short ladies swathing up their little fat necks in voluminous folds of shawls, and shingle women, rejoicing in strips of mantles!
Then the gentlemen!
Your stout man is sure to get into a frock coat, with baggy trowsers; your May-pole, into a long-waisted body-coat, and “continuations” unnecessarily compact; your dark man looks like an “east wind” daguerreotyped, in a light blue neck-tie; while your pink-and-white man looks as though he wanted a pitcher of water in his face, in a salmon-colored or a black one.
Now allow me to suggest. Your thin man should always close the thorax button of his coat, and the last two at his waistband, leaving the intermediate open, to give what he needs – more breadth of chest. Your stout man, who has almost always a nice arm and hand, should have his coat sleeve a perfect fit from the elbow to the wrist, buttoning there tightly– allowing a nice strip of a white linen wristband below it.
I understand the architecture of a coat to a charm; know as quick as a flash whether ’tis all right, the minute I clap my eye on it. As to vests, I call myself a connoisseur. “Stocks” are only fit for Wall Street! Get yourself some nice silk neck-ties, and ask your wife, or somebody who knows something, to longitudinize them to your jugular. Throw your colored, embroidered, and ruffled shirt-bosoms overboard; leave your cane and cigar at home; wear a pair of neat, dark gloves; sport an immaculate pocket-handkerchief and dicky – don’t say naughty words – give us ladies the inside of the walk – speak of every woman as you would wish your mother or your sister spoken of, and you’ll do!
INCIDENT AT THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY
To be able to appreciate Mr. Pease’s toils, and sacrifices, and self-denying labors at the Five Points House of Industry, one must visit the locality: – one must wind through those dirty streets and alleys, and see the wrecks of humanity that meet him at every step; – he must see children so dirty and squalid that they scarcely resemble human beings, playing in filthy gutters, and using language that would curdle his blood to hear from childhood’s lips; – he should see men, “made in God’s own image,” brutalised beyond his power to imagine; – he should see women (girls of not more than twenty years) reeling about the pavements in a state of beastly intoxication, without a trace of feminity in their vicious faces; – he should pass the rum shops, where men and women are quarreling and fighting and swearing, while childhood listens and learns! – he should pass the second-hand clothes cellars, where hard-featured Jewish dealers swing out faded, refuse garments, (pawned by starving virtue for bread,) to sell to the needy, half-naked emigrant for his last penny; – he should see decayed fruit and vegetables which the most ravenous swine might well root twice over before devouring, purchased as daily food by these poor creatures; – he should see gentlemen (?) threading these streets, not to make all this misery less, God knows, but to sever the last thread of hope to which many a tempted one is despairingly clinging.
One must see all this, before he can form a just idea of the magnitude and importance of the work that Mr. Pease has single-handed and nobly undertaken; remembering that men of wealth and influence have their own reasons for using that wealth and influence to perpetuate this modern Sodom.
One should spend an hour in Mr. Pease’s house, to see the constant drafts upon his time and strength, in the shape of calls and messages, and especially the applications for relief that his slender purse alas! is often not able to answer; – he should see his unwearied patience and activity, admire the kind, sympathetic heart – unaffected by the toil or the frowns of temporizing theorists – ever warm, ever pitiful, giving not only “the crumbs from his table,” but often his own meals to the hungry – his own wardrobe to the naked; – he should see this, and go away ashamed to have lived so long and done so little to help the maimed, and sick, and lame, to Bethesda’s Pool.
I will relate an incident which occurred, some time since, at the House of Industry, and which serves as a fair sample of daily occurrences there.
One morning an aged lady, of respectable appearance, called at the Mission House and enquired for Mr. Pease. She was told that he was engaged, and asked if some one else would not do as well. She said, respectfully, “No; my business is with him; I will wait, if you please, till he can see me.”
Mr. Pease immediately came in, when the old lady commenced her story:
“I came, sir,” said she, “in behalf of a poor, unfortunate woman and three little children. She is living now” – and the tears dropped over her wrinkled face – “in a bad place in Willet-street, in a basement. There are rum shops all around it, and many drunken people about the neighborhood. She has made out to pay the rent, but has had no food for the poor little children, who have subsisted on what they could manage to beg in the day time. The landlord promised, when she hired the basement, to put a lock on the door, and make it comfortable, so that ‘the Croton’ need not run in; but he got his rent and then broke his promise, and they have not seen him since.”
“Is the woman respectable?” enquired Mr. Pease.
“Yes – no – not exactly,” said the poor old lady, violently agitated. “She was well brought up. She has a good heart, sir, but a bad head, and then trouble has discouraged her. Poor Mary – yes sir, it must have been the trouble– for I know her heart is good, sir. I” – tears choked the old lady’s utterance. Recovering herself; she continued:
“She had a kind husband once. He was the father of her two little girls: six years ago he died, and – the poor thing – oh, sir, you don’t know how dear she is to me!” and burying her aged face in her hands, she sobbed aloud.
Mr. Pease’s kind heart interpreted the old lady’s emotion, without the pain of an explanation. In the weeping woman before him he saw the mother of the lost one.
Yes, she was “Mary’s” mother. Poverty could not chill her love; shame and the world’s scorn had only filled her with a God-like pity.
After a brief pause, she brushed away her tears and went on:
“Yes, sir; Mary was a good child to me once; she respected religion and religious people, and used to love to go to church, but lately, sir, God knows she has almost broke my heart. Last spring I took her home, and the three dear children; but she would not listen to me, and left without telling me where she was going. I heard that there was a poor woman living in a basement in Willet street, with three children, and my heart told me that that was my poor, lost Mary, and there I found her. But, oh, sir – oh, sir” – and she sobbed as if her heart were breaking – “such a place! My Mary, that I used to cradle in these arms to sleep, that lisped her little evening prayer at my knee —my Mary, drunk in that terrible place!”
She was getting so agitated that Mr. Pease, wishing to turn the current of her thoughts, asked her if she herself was a member of any church. She said yes, of the – street Baptist Church. She said she was a widow, and had had one child beside Mary – a son. And her face lighted up as she said:
“Oh sir, he was such a fine lad. He did all he could to make me happy; but he thought, that if he went to California he could make money, and when he left he said ‘Cheer up, dear mother; I’ll come back and give my money all to you, and you shall never work any more.’”
“I can see him now, sir, as he stood there, with his eye kindling. Poor lad! poor lad! He came back, but it was only to die. His last words were, ‘God will care for you, mother – I know it – when I’m gone to Heaven.’ Oh! if I could have seen my poor girl die as he did, before she became so bad. Oh, sir, won’t you take her here? —won’t you try to make her good? —can’t you make her good, sir? I can’t give Mary up. Nobody cares for Mary now but me. Won’t you try, sir?”
Mr. Pease promised that he would do all he could, and sent a person out with the old lady, to visit “Mary,” and obtain particulars: he soon returned and corroborated all the old lady’s statements. Mr. Pease then took a friend and started to see what could be done.
In Willet street is a rickety old wooden building, filled to overflowing with the very refuse of humanity. The basement is lighted with two small windows half under ground; and in this wretched hole lived Mary and her children. As Mr. Pease descended the steps into the room, he heard some one say, “Here he comes, grandmother! he’s come – he’s come!”
The door was opened. On a pile of rags in the corner lay Mary, “my Mary,” as the old lady tearfully called her.
God of mercy! what a wreck of beautiful womanhood! Her large blue eyes glared with maniac wildness, under the influence of intoxication. Long waves of auburn hair fell, in tangled masses, over a form wasted, yet beautiful in its graceful outlines.
Poor, lost Mary!
“Such a place!” as her mother had, weeping, said. Not a table, or chair, or bedstead, or article of furniture in it, of any description. On the mantle-piece stood a beer-bottle with a half burnt candle in its nose. A few broken, dirty dishes stood upon the shelf, and a quantity of filthy rags lay scattered round the floor.
The grandmother was holding by the hand a sweet child of eight years, with large, bright eyes, and auburn hair (like poor Mary’s) falling about her neck. An older girl of twelve, with a sweet, Madonna face, that seemed to light up even that wretched place with a beam of Heaven, stood near, bearing in her arms a babe of sixteen months, which was not so large as one of eight months should have been. Its little hands looked like bird’s claws, and its little bones seemed almost piercing the skin.
The old lady went up to her daughter, saying, “Mary, dear, this is the gentleman who is willing to take you to his house, if you will try to be good.”
“Get out of the room, you old hypocrite,” snarled the intoxicated woman, “or I’ll – (and she clutched a hatchet beside her) – I’ll show you! You are the worst old woman I ever knew, except the one you brought in here the other day, and she is a fiend outright. Talk to me about being good! – ha – ha” – and she laughed an idiot laugh.
“Mother,” said the eldest child, sweetly laying her little hand upon her arm, – “dear mother, don’t, please don’t hurt grandmother. She is good and kind to us; she only wants to get you out of this bad place, where you will be treated kindly.”
“Yes, dear mother,” chimed in the younger sister, bending her little curly head over her, “mother, you said once you would go. Don’t keep us here any longer, mother. We are cold and hungry. Please get up and take us away; we are afraid to stay here, mother, dear.”
“Yes, Mary,” said the old lady, handing her down a faded, ragged gown, “here is your dress; put it on, wont you!”
Mary raised herself on the pile of rags on which she was lying, and pushing the eldest girl across the room, screamed out, “Get away, you impudent little thing! you are just like your old grandmother. I tell you all,” said she, raising herself on one elbow, and tossing back her auburn hair from her broad, white forehead, “I tell you all, I never will go from here, never! I love this place. So many fine people come here, and we have such good times. There is a gentleman who takes care of me. He brought me some candles, last night, and he says that I shan’t want for anything, if I will only get rid of these troublesome children —my husband’s children.” And she hid her face in her hands and laughed convulsively.
“You may have them,” she continued, “just as soon as you like – baby and all! but I never will go from this place. I love it. A great many fine people come here to see me.”
The poor old lady wrung her hands and wept, while the children clung round their grandmother, with half-averted faces, trembling and silent.
Mr. Pease said to her, “Mary, you may either go with me, or I’ll send for an officer and have you carried to the station-house. Which will you do?”
Mary cursed and raved, but finally put on the dress the old lady handed her, and consented to go with them. A carriage was soon procured, and Mary helped inside – Mr. Pease lifting in the baby and the two little girls, and away they started for the Five Points House of Industry.
“Oh, mother!” exclaimed the younger of the girls, “how very pleasant it is to ride in this nice carriage, and to get away from that dirty place; we shall be so happy now, mother; and Edith and the baby too: see, he is laughing: he likes to ride. You will love sister Edith and baby, and me, now, wont you, dear mother? and you wont frighten us with the hatchet any more, or hurt dear grandmother, will you?”
Arriving at Mr. Pease’s house, the delight of the little creatures was unbounded. They caught hold of their mother’s faded dress, saying, “Didn’t we tell you, mother, that you would have a pleasant home here? Only see that nice garden! you didn’t have a garden in Willet Street, mother!”
Reader, would you know that mother’s after history?
Another “Mary” hath “bathed the Saviour’s feet” with her tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Her name is no longer written Mary Magdalena. In the virtuous home of her aged mother, she sits clothed in her right mind, “and her children rise up and call her blessed.”
