Fresh Leaves

We quote the following specimens of Miss Murray’s style:

“At the house of his sister I saw another work by the same artist: two children, the one as an angel leading the awakened soul of the other, with an inscription below; very pretty!”

Again.

Speaking of the cholera in Boston, and the practice of using hot vinegar there, as a disinfective, she says:

“I was told a carriage of this fumigated liquid had been driven through the streets; there are deaths here every day and some at Newport, but it is not believed to be contagious at present, only carrying off the profligate and the debilitated.”

Again.

“Till my introduction to the Governor of New York I did not know that each State has a Governor. Governor Seymour lives at Albany. Some of those Governors are only elected for two years, and this gentleman does credit to popular choice.”

So much for the Queen’s English! Now for one or two specimens of her penetration. The first quotation we make will undoubtedly cause as much surprise to the very many benevolent associations in Boston (which are constantly deploring their inability to meet the voices of distress which cry, help us!), as it did to ourself:

“I never met a beggar in Boston, not even among the Irish, and ladies have told me that they could not find a family on which to exercise their benevolent feelings!”

Governor Seymour, Miss Murray’s friend, will doubtless feel flattered by the following patronizing mention of him. And here we will say, that it would have been more politic in the Hon. Miss Amelia, when we consider England’s late relations to Sebastopol, had she omitted to touch upon so ticklish a subject as British military discipline.

Speaking of Governor Seymour’s review of the New York troops, on Evacuation Day, she says:

“Governor Seymour reviewed these troops in front of the City Hall with as much tranquillity of manner and simple dignity as might have been evinced by one of the most experienced of our public men!”

One more instance of Miss Murray’s superior powers of observation:

“I have found out the reason why ladies, traveling alone in the United States, must be extravagantly dressed; without that precaution they meet with no attention, and little civility, decidedly much less than in any other country, so here it is not as women, but as ladies, they are cared for, and this in Democratic America!”

In the first place, every body but Miss Murray knows that an American lady never “travels expensively dressed.” That there are females who do this, just as they walk our streets in a similar attire, and for a similar purpose, is undeniable; and that they receive from the opposite sex the “attentions” which they seek, is also true; but this, it seems to us, should hardly disturb the serenity of a “Maid of Honor!”

As an American woman, and proud of our birth-right, we resent from our British sister her imputation upon the proverbial chivalry of American gentlemen. We have traveled alone, and in threadbare garments, and we have never found these garments non-conductors of the respectful courtesy of American gentlemen; they have never prevented the coveted glass of water being proffered to our thirsty lips at the dépôt; the offer of the more eligible seat on the shady side of the cars; the offer of the beguiling newspaper, or book, or magazine; the kindly excluding of annoying dust or sun by means of obstinate blinds or windows, unmanageable by feminine fingers; the offer of camphor or cologne for headache or faintness, or one, or all, of the thousand attentions to which the chivalry of American gentlemen prompts them without regard to externals, and too often (shame on the recipients!) without the reward of the bright smile, or kindly “thank you,” to which they are so surely entitled.

I could cite many instances in contradiction of Miss Murray’s assertion that it is “not as women but as ladies,” that American gentlemen care for the gentler sex in America. I will mention only two, out of many, which have come under my own personal observation.

Every body in New York must have noticed the decrepit old woman, with her basket of peanuts and apples, who sits on the steps near the corner of Canal-street (for how long a period the oldest inhabitant only knows). One day toward nightfall, when the execrable state of the crossings almost defied petticoat-dom, I saw her slowly gather up her decrepit limbs, and undiminished wares, and, leaning upon her stick, slowly totter homeward. She reached the point where she wished to cross; it was slippery, wet, and crowded with a Babel of carts and carriages.

She looked despondingly up and down with her faded eyes, and I was about to proffer her my assistance when a gentlemanly, handsome young man stepped to her side, and drawing her withered hand within his arm, safely guided her tottering footsteps across to the opposite sidewalk; then, with a bow, graceful and reverential enough to have satisfied even the cravings of the honorable and virginal Miss Murray, he left her. It was a holy and a beautiful sight, and by no means an uncommon one, “even in America.”

Again. I was riding in an omnibus, when a woman, very unattractive in person and dress, got out, leaving a very common green vail upon the seat. A gentleman present sprang after her with it in his hand, ran two blocks, placed it in her possession, and returned to his place, not having received even a bow of thanks from the woman in whose service his nicely polished boots had been so plentifully mud-bespattered.

If “the honorable Miss Murray” came to this country with the expectation that a coach-and-six would be on hand to convey her from every dépôt to the hotel she was to honor with her aristocratic presence, or that gentlemen would remain with their heads uncovered, and their hands on the left side of their vests as she passed, in honor of the reflected effulgence of England’s Queen (supposed to emanate from Miss Murray’s very ordinary person), it is no marvel she was disappointed. We should like to be as sure, when we travel in England, of being (as a woman), as well and as courteously treated by John Bull as was the honorable Miss Amelia by Brother Jonathan in America.

That there may be men, “even in America,” who measure out their nods, and bows, and wreathed smiles, by the wealth and position of the recipient, we do not doubt; for we have seen such, but would gently suggest to “the honorable Miss Amelia” that in the pockets of such men she will generally find —naturalization papers!

A HOUSE WITHOUT A BABY

There was not a child in the house, not one; I was sure of it, when I first went in. Such a spick-and-span look as it had! Chairs – grown-up chairs, plastered straight up against the wall; books arranged by rule and compass; no dear little careless finger-marks on furniture, doors, or window-glass; no hoop, or ball, or doll, or mitten, or basket, or picture-book on the premises; not a pin, or a shred on the angles and squares of the immaculate carpet; the tassels of the window shades, at which baby-fingers always make such a dead set, as fresh as if just from the upholsterer’s. I sat down at the well-polished window, and looked across the street. At the upper window of a wooden house opposite, I saw a little bald baby, tied into a high chair, speculating upon the panorama in the street, while its little fat hands frantically essayed to grab distant pedestrians on the sidewalk. Its mother sat sewing diligently by its side. Happy woman! she has a baby! She thought so, too; for by-and-by she threw down her work, untied the fettering handkerchief, took the child from its prison-house, and covered it with kisses. Ah! she had heard a step upon the stairs —the step! And now there are two to kiss the baby; for John has come to his dinner, and giving both mother and child a kiss that made my lips work, he tosses the babe up in his strong arms, while its mother puts dinner on the table.

But, pshaw! – here come the old maids I was sent to see. I hear the rustle of their well-preserved silks in the entry. I feel proper all over. Vinegar and icicles! how shall I ever get through with it? Now the door opens. What a bloodless look they have? – how dictionary-ish they speak! – how carefully they lower themselves into their chairs, as if the cushions were stuffed with live kittens! – how smooth their ruffs and ribbons!

Bibs and pinafores! Give me the upper room in the wooden house, with kissing John and the bald baby!

GLANCES AT PHILADELPHIA. NUMBER ONE

And this is Philadelphia! All hail, Philadelphia! Where a lady’s aching fingers may be reprieved from the New York thraldom of skirt-holding off dirty pavements; where the women have the good taste, in dress, to eschew the gaudy tulip and array themselves like the lily; where hoops are unknown, or at least so modified as to become debateable ground; where lady shop-keepers know how to be civil to their own sex, and do not keep you standing on one leg an hour after you hand them a bill, while with hawk eye and extended forefinger they peruse that nuisance called the “Counterfeit Detector.” Where the goods, not better than in New York, save in their more quiet hue, are never crammed down a customer’s unwilling throat; where omnibus-drivers do not expectorate into the coach-windows, or bang clouds of dust into your doomed eyes from the roof, thumping for your fare, or start their vehicles before female feet have taken leave of what has nearly proved to so many of us the final step! where the markets – but hold! they deserve a paragraph by themselves.

Ye gods! what butter! Shall I ever again swallow the abominable concoction called butter in New York? That I – Fanny Fern – should have lived to this time, and never known the bliss of tasting Philadelphia butter! – never seen those golden pounds, each separately folded in its fresh green leaf, reposing so temptingly, and crying, Eat me, so eloquently, from the snow-white tubs! What have the Philadelphians done that they should be fed on such crisp vegetables, such fresh fruits, and such creamy ice-creams? That their fish should come dripping to their mouths from their native element. That their meat should wait to be carried home, instead of crawling by itself? Why should the most circumscribed and frugal of housekeepers, who goes with her snowy basket to buy her husband’s dinner, be able to daintyfy his table with a fragrant sixpenny bouquet? Why should the strawberries be so big, and dewy, and luscious? Why should the peas, and cauliflowers, and asparagus, and lettuce – Great Cæsar! what have the Philadelphians done that they should wallow in such high-stepping clover?

I have it!

It is the reward of virtue —It is the smile of Heaven on men who are too chivalric to puff tobacco-smoke in ladies’ faces which beautify and brighten their streets. They deserve it – they deserve their lily-appareled wives and roly-poly, kissable, sensibly-dressed children. They deserve to walk up those undefiled marble-steps, into their blessed home sanctuaries, overshadowed by those grand, patriarchal trees. They deserve that their bright-eyed sons should be educated in a noble institution like “The Central High School,” where pure ventilation and cheerfulness are considered of as much importance as mathematics, or Greek and Latin. Where the placid brow and winning smile of the Principal are more potent auxiliaries than ferules or frowns. Give me the teacher on whose desk blooms the bouquet, culled by a loving pupil’s fingers; whose eye, magnetic with kindness – whose voice, electric with love for his calling, wakes up into untiring action all that is best and noblest in the sympathetic, fresh young hearts before him. A human teacher, who recognizes in every boy before him (be he poorly or richly clad – be he glorious in form and face as a young Apollo, or cramped and dwarfed into unshapeliness in the narrow cradle of poverty) an immortal soul, clamorous with its craving needs, seeking the light, throwing out its luxuriant tendrils for something strong and kindly to cling to, longing for the upper air of expansion and strength. God bless the human teacher who recognizes, and acts as if he recognized this! Heaven multiply such schools as “The Philadelphia High School,” with its efficient Principal, its able Professors and teachers, and its graduates who number by scores the noble and honored of the land, and of the sea.

I love to linger in cemeteries. And so, in company with an editorial friend, Colonel Fitzgerald, of the Philadelphia City Item, to whose hospitality, with that of his lovely wife, I am much indebted, I visited “Laurel Hill.” The group “Old Mortality” at its entrance needs no praise of mine. The eye might linger long ere it wearied in gazing at it. I like cemeteries, but I like not elaborate monuments, or massive iron railings; a simple hedge – a simple head-stone (where the tiny bird alights, ere, like the parting spirit, it plumes its wings for a heavenward flight) for its inscription – the words to which the universal heart has responded, and will respond till time shall be no longer – till the graves give up their dead; “Mother” – “Husband” – “Wife” – “Child” – what epitaph can improve this? what language more eloquently measure the height and breadth, and length and depth of sorrow?

And so, as I read these simple words at “Laurel Hill,” my heart sympathized with those unallied to me, save by the common bond of bereavement; and thus I passed on – until I came to an author’s grave – no critic’s pen again to sting that heart; – pulseless it must have been, not to have stirred with all the wealth of bud and blossom, waving tree and shining river, that lay bathed in the golden, summer sunlight above him. So, God willing, would I sleep at last; but not yet – not yet, my pen, till thou hast shouted again and again —Courage! Courage!– to earth’s down-trodden and weary-hearted.

GLANCES AT PHILADELPHIA. NUMBER TWO

If you want to see unmasked human nature, keep your eyes open in railroad cars and on steamboats. See that man now, poring over a newspaper, while he is passing through scenery where the shifting lights and shadows make pictures every instant, more beautiful than an artist ever dreamed. See that woman, who has journeyed with her four children hundreds of miles alone – as I am proud to say women may safely journey in America (if they behave themselves) – travel-stained, care-worn and weary, listening to, and answering patiently and pleasantly the thousand and one questions of childhood; distributing to them, now a cracker, now a sip of water from the cask in the corner, brushing back the hair from their flushed brows, while her own is throbbing with the pain, of which she never speaks. In yonder corner are two Irish women, each with a little red-fretted baby, in the universal Erin uniform of yellow; their little heads bobbing helplessly about in the bumping cars, screaming lustily for the comfort they well know is close at hand, and which the public are notified they have at last found, by a ludicrously instantaneous suspension of their vociferous cries. Beautiful as bountiful provision of Nature! which, if there was no other proof of a God, would suffice for me.

There is a surly old fellow, who won’t have the windows open, though the pale woman beside him mutely entreats it, with her smelling-salts to her nose. Yonder is an old bachelor, listening to a sweet little blue-eyed girl, who, with untasked faith in human nature, has crept from her mother’s side, and selected him for an audience, to say – “that once there was a kid, with two little totty kids, and don’t you believe that one night when the old mother kid was asleep,” etc., etc. No wonder he stoops to kiss the little orator; no wonder he laughs at her naïve remarks; no wonder she has magnetised the watch from his pocket “to hear what it says;” no wonder he smooths back the curly locks from the frank, white brow; no wonder he presses again and again his bachelor lips to that rosy little mouth; no wonder, when the distant city nears us, and the lisping “good-by” is chirruped, and the little feet are out of sight and sound, that he sighs, – God and his own soul know why! Blessed childhood – thy shortest life, though but a span, hath yet its mission. The tiniest babe never laid its velvet cheek on the sod till it had delivered its Maker’s message – heeded not then, perhaps – but coming to the wakeful ear in the silent night-watch, long after the little preacher was dust. Blessed childhood!

It is funny, as well as edifying, to watch hotel arrivals; to see the dusty, hungry, lack-luster-eyed travelers drag into the eating-room – take their allotted seats – enviously regard those consumers of dainties who have already had the good fortune, by rank of precedence, to get their hungry mouths filled; to see them at last “fall to,” as Americans only know how. Heaven help the landlord! Beef-steak, chicken, omelette, mutton-chops, biscuit and coffee – at one fell swoop. Waiters, who it is to be hoped, have not been kept breakfastless since early daylight, looking on calm, but disgusted. Now, their appetites appeased, that respectable family yonder begin to notice that Mr. and Mrs. Fitzsnooks and Miss Fitzsnooks opposite, who are aristocratically delicate in their appetites, are shocked beyond the power of expression. They begin, as they wipe their satisfied lips with their table-napkins, and contemplate Miss Fitzsnooks’s showy breakfast-robe, to bethink them of their dusty traveling-dresses; as if – foolish creatures – they were not in infinitely better taste, soiled as they are, than her gaudy finery at so early an hour – as if a man was not a man “for a’ that” – ay, and a woman, too – as if there could be vulgarity without pretension – as if the greatest vulgarity was not ostentatious pretension.

“Fairmount,” of which the Philadelphians are so justly proud, is no misnomer. He must be cynical, indeed, hopelessly weak in the understanding, who would grumble at the steep ascent by means of which so lovely a panorama is enjoyed. At every step some new beauty develops itself to the worshiper of nature. In the gray old rocks, festooned with the vivid green of the woodbine and ivy, considerately draping statues for eyes – I confess it, more prudish than mine. The placid Schuylkill flowing calmly below, with its emerald-fringed banks, nesting the homes of wealth and luxury; enjoyed less, perhaps, by their owners, than by the industrious artisan, who, reprieved from his day’s toil, stands gazing at them with his wife and children, and inhaling the breeze, of which, God be thanked, the rich man has no monopoly.

Of course I visited Philadelphia “State-House;” of course I talked with the nice old gentleman who guards the country’s relics; of course I stared – with my ’76 blood at fever heat – upon the big bell which clanged forth so joyfully our American independence; of course I stared at the piece of stone-step, from which the news of our Independence was first announced; and of course I wondered how it was possible for it, under such circumstances, to remain stone. Of course I sat down in the venerable, high-backed leather chair, in which so many great men of that time, and so many little men of this have reposed. Of course I reverently touched the piece of a pew which formerly was part of “Christ Church,” and in which Franklin and Washington had worshiped. Of course I inscribed my name, at the nice old gentleman’s request, in the mammoth book for visitors. And of course I mounted to the Cupola of the State House to see “the view;” which, with due submission, I did not think worth (from that point) the strain on my ankles, or the confused state of my cranium, consequent upon repeated losses of my latitude and longitude, while pursuing my stifled and winding way.

“The Mint?” Oh – certainly, I saw the Mint! and wondered, as I looked at the shining heaps, that any of Uncle Sam’s children should ever want a cent; also, I wondered if the workmen who fingered them, did not grow, by familiarity, indifferent to their value – and to their possession. I was told that not the minutest particle of the metal, whether fused or otherwise, could be abstracted without detection. I was glad, as I always am, in a fitting establishment, to see women employed in various offices – such as stamping the coin, etc., and more glad still, to learn that they had respectable wages. Heaven speed the time when a thousand other doors of virtuous labor shall be opened to them, and silence for ever the heart-rending “Song of the Shirt.”

GLANCES AT PHILADELPHIA. NUMBER THREE

Always an if! If the Philadelphians would not barricade their pretty houses with those ugly wooden outside shutters, with those ugly iron hinges. I am sure my gypsy breath would draw hard behind one. And if the Philadelphians would not build such garrison-like walls about their beautiful gardens. Why not allow the passer-by to view what would give so much pleasure? certainly, we would hope, without abstracting any from the proprietors. Clinton avenue, as well as other streets in Brooklyn, is a beautiful example of this. Light, low iron railings about the well-kept lawns and gardens – sunset groups of families upon piazzas, and O – prettier yet – little children darting about like butterflies among the flowers. I missed this in Philadelphia. The balmy air of evening seemed only the signal for barring up each family securely within those jail-like shutters; behind which, I am sure, beat hearts as warm and friendly as any stranger could wish to meet, I must say I feel grateful to any householder who philanthropically refreshes the public eye with the vines and flowers he has wreathed about his home. I feel grateful to any woman I meet, who rests my rainbow-sated eye by a modest, tasteful costume. I thank every well-made man who passes me with well-knit limbs and expanded chest, encased in nice linen, and a coat he can breathe in; yes – why not? Do you purse up your mouth at this? do you say it was not proper for me to have said this? I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go “neck and heels” into it. Proper! it is a fence behind which indelicacy is found hidden much oftener than in the open highway. Out upon proper! So I say again, I like to see a well-made man – made – not by the tailor – but by the Almighty. I glory in his luxuriant beard; in his firm step; in his deep, rich voice; in his bright, falcon eye. I thank him for being handsome, and letting me see him. We all yearn for the beautiful; the little child, who drew its first breath in a miserable cellar, and has known no better home, has yet its cracked mug or pitcher, with the treasured dandelion or clover blossoms. Be generous, ye householders, who have the means to gratify a taste to which God himself ministers, and hoard not your gardens and flowers for the palled eye of satiety. Let the little child, who, God knows, has few flowers enough in its earthly pathway, peep through the railing, and, if only for a brief moment, dream of paradise.

The Philadelphia Opera House, which I am told is a very fine one, I did not see, as I intended, as also many institutions which I hope yet to visit, when I can make a longer stay. Of one of the principal theaters I will say, that she must be a courageous woman who would dare to lean back against its poisonously dirty cushions. Ten minutes sufficed me to breathe an atmosphere that would have disgraced the “Five Points;” and to listen to tragic howlings only equaled in the drunken brawls of that locality. Upon my exit, I looked with new surprise upon the first pair of immaculate marble steps I encountered, and putting this and that together, gave up the vexed problem. New York streets may be dirty, but our places of amusement are clean.

At one public institution I visited, we were shown about by the most dignified and respectable of gray-haired old men; so much so, that I felt serious compunctions lest I should give trouble by asking questions which agitated my very inquiring mind. Bowing an adieu to him, with the reverence with which his appearance had inspired me, we were about to pass down the principal stairs to the main entrance, when he touched the gentleman who accompanied me on the shoulder, and said in an undertone, not intended for my ears, “Please don’t offer me money, sir, in the presence of any one!” A minute after he had pocketed, with a bow, the neatly-extracted coin (which I should as soon have thought of offering to General Washington), and with a parting touch of his warning forefinger to his lip, intended for my companion, we found ourselves outside the building, doing justice to his generalship by explosive bursts of laughter. So finished was the performance, that we admiringly agreed to withhold the name of the venerable perpetrator.