Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio.

FEMININE WAITERS AT HOTELS

“Some of our leading hotel-keepers are considering the policy of employing female waiters.”

Good news for you, poor pale-faced sempstresses! Throw your thimbles at the heads of your penurious employers; put on your neatest and plainest dress; see that your feet and fingers are immaculate, and then rush en masse for the situation, ousting every white jacket in Yankeedom. Stipulate with your employers, for leave to carry in the pocket of your French apron, a pistol loaded with cranberry sauce, to plaster up the mouth of the first coxcomb who considers it necessary to preface his request for an omelette, with “My dear.” It is my opinion that one such hint will be sufficient; if not, you can vary the order of exercises, by anointing him with a “hasty plate of soup” at dinner.

Always make a moustache wait twice as long as you do a man who wears a clean, presentable lip. Should he undertake to expedite your slippers by “a fee,” tell him that hotel bills are generally settled at the clerk’s office, except by very verdant travelers.

Should you see a woman at the table, digging down to the bottom of the salt cellar, as if the top stratum were too plebeian; or ordering ninety-nine messes (turning aside from each with affected airs of disgust,) or rolling up the whites of her eyes, declaring that she never sat down to a dinner-table before minus “finger glasses,” you may be sure that her aristocratic blood is nourished, at home, on herrings and brown bread. When a masculine comes in with a white vest, flashy neck-tie, extraordinary looking plaid trousers, several yards of gold chain festooned over his vest, and a mammoth seal ring on his little finger, you may be sure that his tailor and his laundress are both on the anxious seat; and whenever you see travelers of either sex peregrinating the country in their “best bib and tucker,” you can set them down for unmitigated “snobs,” for high-bred people can’t afford to be so extravagant!

I dare say you’ll get sick of so much pretension and humbug. Never mind; it is better than to be stitching yourselves into a consumption over six-penny shirts; you’ll have your fun out of it. This would be a horridly stupid world, if every body were sensible. I thank my stars every day, for the share of fools a kind Providence sends in my way.

LETTER TO THE EMPRESS EUGENIA

A Paris Letter says: – Lady Montijo has left Paris for Spain. She was extremely desirous of remaining and living in the reflection of her daughter’s grandeur, but Louis Napoleon, who shares in the general prejudice against step-mothers, gave her plainly to understand, that because he had married Eugenia, she must not suppose he had married her whole family. She was allowed to linger six weeks, to have the entree of the Tuileries, and to see her movements chronicled in the Pays. She has at last left us, and the telegraph mentions her arrival at Orleans, on her way to the Peninsula.

There Teba! did not I say you would need all those two-thousand-franc pocket-handkerchiefs before your orange wreath had begun to give signs of wilting? Why did you let your mamma go, you little simpleton? Before Nappy secured your neck in the matrimonial noose, you should have had it put down, in black and white, that Madame Montijo was to live with you till – the next revolution, if you chose to have her. Now you have struck your colors, of course everything will “go by the board.” I tell you Teba, that a fool is the most unmanageable of all beings. He is as dogged and perverse as a broken-down donkey. You can neither goad nor coax him into doing anything he should do, or prevent his doing what he should not do. You will have to leave Nappy and come over here; – and then everybody will nudge somebody’s elbow and say, “That is Mrs. Teba Napoleon, who does not live with her husband.” And some will say it is your fault; and others will say ’tis his; and all will tell you a world more about it, than you can tell them.

Then, Mrs. Samuel Snip (who has the next room to yours, who murders the king’s English most ruthlessly, and is not quite certain whether Barnum or Christopher Columbus discovered America,) will have her Paul Pry ear to the keyhole of your door about every other minute, (except when her husband is on duty,) to find out if you are properly employed; – and no matter what Mrs. Snip learns, or even if she does not learn anything, she will be pretty certain to report, that, in her opinion, you are “no better than you should be.” If you dress well (with your splendid form and carriage you could not but seem well-dressed) she will “wonder how you got the means to do it”; prefacing her remark with the self-evident truth that, “to be sure, it is none of her business.”

If you let your little Napoleon get out of your sight a minute, somebody will have him by the pinafore and put him through a catechism about his mamma’s mode of living and how she spends her time. If you go to church, it will be “to show yourself;” if you stay at home, “you are a publican and a sinner.” Do what you will, it will all be wrong: if you do nothing, it will be still worse. Our gentlemen (so called) knowing that you are defenceless and taking it for granted that your name is “Barkis,” will all stare at you; and the women will dislike and abuse you just in proportion as the opposite sex admire you. Of course you will sweep past them all, with that magnificent figure of yours, and your regal chin up in the air, quietly attending to your own business, and entirely unconscious of their pigmy existence.

MUSIC IN THE NATURAL WAY

How often, when wedged in a heated concert room, annoyed by the creaking of myriad fans, and tortured optically, by the glare of gas-light, have I, with a gipsey longing, wished that the four walls might be razed, leaving only the blue sky over my head, that the tide of music might unfettered flow over my soul.

How often, when dumb with delight, in the midst of some scene of surpassing natural beauty, have I silently echoed the poet’s words:

My dream was all realized at a promenade concert at Castle Garden, last night. Shall I ever forget it? That glorious expanse of sea, glittering in the moonbeams; the little boats gliding smoothly over its polished surface; the cool, evening zephyr, fanning the brow wooingly; the music – soothing – thrilling – then quickening the pulse and stirring the blood, like the sound of a trumpet; then, that rare boon, a companion, who had the good taste to be dumb, and not disturb my trance.

There was one drawback. After the doxology, I noticed some matter-of-fact wretches devouring ice creams. May no priest be found to give them absolution. I include, also, in this anathema, those ever-to-be-avoided masculines, who, then and there, puffed cigar smoke in my face, and the moon’s.

FOR LADIES THAT “GO SHOPPING.”

Matrimony and the toothache may be survived, but of all the evils feminity is heir to, defend me from a shopping excursion. But, alas! bonnets, shoes and hose will wear out, and shop-keepers will chuckle over the sad necessity that places the unhappy owners within their dry-goods clutches. Felicitous Mrs. Figleaf! why taste that Paradisaical apple?

Some victimised females frequent the stores where soiled and damaged goods are skillfully announced as selling at an “immense sacrifice,” by their public-spirited and disinterested owners. Some courageously venture into more elegant establishments, where the claim of the applicant to notice, is measured by the costliness of her apparel, and where the clerks poise their eye-glass at any plebeian shopperess bold enough to inquire for silk under six dollars a yard. Others, still, are tortured at the counter of some fussy old bachelor, who always ties up, with distressing deliberation, every parcel he takes down for inspection, before he can open another, and moves round to execute your orders as if Mt. Atlas were fastened to his heels; or perhaps get petrified at the store of some snap-dragon old maid, whose victims serve as escape-valves for long years of bile, engendered by Cupid’s oversights. Meanwhile, the vexed question is still unsolved, Where can the penance of shopping be performed with the least possible wear and tear of patience and prunella? The answer seems to me to be contained in six letters – “Stewart’s.”

“Stewart’s?” I think I hear some old lady exclaim, dropping her knitting and peering over her spectacles; “Stewart’s! yes, if you have the mines of California to back you.” Now I have a profound respect for old ladies, as I stand self-pledged to join that respectable body on the advent of my very first gray hair; still, with due deference to their catnip and pennyroyal experience, I conscientiously repeat – “Stewart’s.”

You may stroll through his rooms free to gaze and admire, without being annoyed by an impertinent clerk dogging your footsteps; you can take up a fabric, and examine it, without being bored by a statement of its immense superiority over every article of the kind in the market, or without being deafened by a detailed account of the enormous sums that the mushroom aristocracy have considered themselves but too happy to expend, in order to secure a dress from that very desirable, and altogether unsurpassed, and unsurpassable, piece of goods!

You can independently say that an article does not exactly suit you, though your husband may not stand by you with a drawn sword. You will encounter no ogling, no impertinent cross-questioning, no tittering whispers, from the quiet, well-bred clerks, who attend to their own business and allow you to attend to yours.

’Tis true that you may see at Stewart’s, cobweb laces an inch or two wide, for fifty or one hundred dollars a yard, which many a brainless butterfly of fashion is supremely happy in sporting: but at the very next counter you may suit yourself, or your country cousin, to a sixpenny calico, or a shilling de laine; and, what is better, be quite as sure that her verdant queries will be as respectfully answered as if liveried Pompey stood waiting at the door to hand her to her carriage.

You can go into the silk department, where, by a soft descending light, you will see dinner dresses that remind you of a shivered rainbow, for passé married ladies who long since ceased to celebrate their birth-days, and who keep their budding daughters carefully immured in the nursery: or, at the same counter, you can select a modest silk for your minister’s wife, at six shillings a yard, that will cause no heart-burnings in the most Argus-eyed of Paul Pry parishes.

Then if you patronise those ever-to-be-abominated and always-to-be-shunned nuisances called parties, where fools of both sexes gather to criticise their host and hostess, and cut up characters and confectionary, you can step into that little room from which day-light is excluded, and select an evening dress, by gas-light, upon the effect of which you can, of course, depend, and to which artistic arrangement many a New York belle has probably owed that much prized possession – her “last conquest.”

Now, if you please, you can go into the upholstery-room and furnish your nursery windows with a cheap set of plain linen curtains; or you can expend a small fortune in regal crimson, or soft-blue damask drapery, for your drawing-room; and without troubling yourself to thread the never-ending streets of Gotham for an upholsteress, can have them made by competent persons in the upper loft of the building, who will also drape them faultlessly about your windows, should you so desire.

Now you can peep into the cloak room, and bear away on your graceful shoulders a six, twenty, thirty, or four hundred dollar cloak, as the length of your husband’s purse, or your own fancy (which in these degenerate days amounts to pretty much the same thing) may suggest.

Then there is the wholesale department, where you will see shawls, hosiery, flannels, calicoes, and de laines, sufficient to stock all the nondescript country stores, to say nothing of city consumption.

Now, if you are not weary, you can descend (under ground) into the carpet department, from whence you can hear the incessant roll of full-freighted omnibuses, the ceaseless tramp of myriad restless feet, and all the busy train of out-door life made audible in all the dialects of Babel. Here you can see every variety of carpet, from the homespun, unpretending straw, oil cloth, and Kidderminster, to the gorgeous Brussels and tapestry, (above whose traceried buds and flowers the daintiest foot might well poise itself, loth to crush,) up to the regal Axminster, of Scottish manufacture, woven without seam, and warranted, in these days of late suppers and tobacco smoking, to last a life-time.

Emerging from this subterranean region, you will ascend into daylight, and reflecting first upon all this immense outlay, and then upon the frequent and devastating conflagrations in New York, inquire with solicitude, Are you insured? and regret to learn that there is too much risk to effect an entire insurance, although Argus-eyed watchmen keep up a night-and-day patrol throughout the handsome building.

MODERN IMPROVEMENTS

“Modern improvements?” I wonder where they are? Perhaps it is the fashionable cloaks, that take leave of their shivering owners at the hips; or the long skirts, whose muddy trains every passing pedestrian pins to the sidewalk; or the Lilliputian bonnets, that never a string in shop-dom can keep within hailing distance of the head; or the flowing sleeves, through which the winter wind plays around the arm-pits; or the break-neck, high-heeled boots, which some little, dumpy feminine has introduced to gratify her rising ambition, and render her tall sisters hideous; or the gas-lit, furnace-heated houses, in which the owners’ eyes are extinguished, and their skins dried to a parchment; or, perhaps, it is the churches, of such cathedral dimness, that the clergyman must have candles at noonday, and where the congregation are forbidden to express their devotion by singing, and forced to listen to the trills and quavers of some scientific stage mountebank; or perhaps ’tis the brazen irreverence with which Young America jostles aside gray-headed Wisdom: perhaps the comfortless, forsaken fireside of the “strong-minded woman:” perhaps, the manly gossip, whose repetition of some baseless rumor dims the bright eyes of defenceless innocence with tears of anguish: perhaps the schools, where a superficial show of brilliancy on exhibition days, is considered the ne plus ultra of teaching: perhaps it is the time-serving clergyman, whose tongue is fettered by a monied clique: perhaps, the lawyers who lie – under a mistake! – perhaps it is the doctor, whom I saw yesterday at Aunt Jerusha’s sick-room, a little thing with bits of feet, and mincing voice, and lily-white hands, and perfumed moustache. I wanted to inquire what ailed Jerusha, so I waited to see him. I wanted to ask him how long it would take him to cure her, and if he preferred pills to powders, blisters to plasters, oat-meal to barley-gruel, wine-whey to posset, arrow-root to farina, and a few such little things, you know. He stared at me over his dicky, as if I had been an unevangelized kangaroo; then he sidled up to Jerusha, pryed open her mouth, and said “humph” – in Latin. Then he crossed his legs, and rolled up the whites of his eyes at the ceiling, as if he expected some Esculapian hand writing on the wall to enlighten him as to the seat of Aunt Jerusha’s complaint. Then, he drew from his pocket a box with a whole army of tiny bottles; and uncorking two of them he nipped out a little white speck from each, which he dissolved in four quarts of water, and told Jerusha “to take a drop of the water once in eight hours.” Tom Thumb and Lilliput! he might as well have tried to salt the Atlantic Ocean with a widower’s tear! He should be laid gently on a lily leaf, and consigned to the first stray zephyr.

Ah, you should have seen our good, old-fashioned Dr. Jalap; with a fist like a sledge-hammer, a tramp like a war-horse, and a laugh that would puzzle an echo. He wasn’t penurious of his physic: he didn’t care a pin how much he put down your throat – no, nor the apothecary either. He pill-ed and potioned, and emetic-ed, and blistered, and plastered, till you were so transparent, that even John Mitchell (and he’s the shortest-sighted being alive) could have seen through you. And then he braced you up with Iron and Quinine, till your muscles were like whip-cords, and your hair in a bristle of kinks. He was human-like, too; he didn’t stalk in as if Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington were boiled down to make his grandfather. No; he’d just as lief sit down on a butter-firkin as on a velvet lounge. He’d pick up Aunt Esther’s knitting-needles, and talk to grandpa about Bunker Hill, and those teetotally discomfrizzled, bragging British, and offer grandma a pinch of snuff, and trot the baby, and stroke the cat, and go to the closet and eat up the pickles and doughnuts, and make himself useful generally. He didn’t have to stupefy his patients with ether, so that they needn’t find out how clumsily he operated. No, it was quite beautiful to see him take a man’s head between his knees, and drag his double teeth out. He didn’t write a prescription for molasses and water, in High Dutch: he didn’t tell you that you were booked for the river Styx, and he was the only M. D. in creation who could annihilate the ferryman waiting to row you over. He didn’t drive through the town with his horse and gig, at break-neck speed, just as meeting was out, as if life and death were hanging on his profitless chariot wheels: he didn’t stick up over his door – “at home between nine and ten,” as if that consecrated hour were all he could bestow upon a clamorous public, when he was angling in vain for a patient every hour in the twenty-four; nor did he give little boys shillings to rush into church, and call him out in the middle of the service. No: Dr. Jalap was not a “modern improvement.”

THE OLD MERCHANT WANTS A SITUATION

“An elderly gentleman, formerly a well-known merchant, wishes a situation; he will engage in any respectable employment not too laborious.” —New York Daily Paper.

I don’t know the old man. I never saw him on ’change, in a fine suit of broadcloth, leaning on his gold-headed cane; while brokers, and insurance officers, and presidents of banks raised their hats deferentially, and the crowd respectfully made way for him. I never kept account of the enormous taxes he annually paid the city, or saw his gallant ships ploughing the blue ocean with their costly freight, to foreign ports. I never saw him in his luxurious home, taking his quiet siesta, lulled by the liquid voice of his fairy daughter. No: nor did I hear the auctioneer’s hammer in that home, nor see the red flag floating, like a signal of distress, before the door. I didn’t read the letter that recalled his only boy from college, or see the humbled family, as they passed, shrinking, over the threshold, into poor lodgings, whose landlord coarsely stipulated for “a week’s rent in advance.”

“Any occupation not too laborious.” How mournfully the old man’s words fall upon the ear! Life to commence anew, with the silver head, and bent form, and faltering step, and palsied hand of age! With the first ray of morning light, that hoary head must be lifted from an unquiet pillow, to encounter the drenching rain, and driving sleet, and piercing cold. No reprieve from that wearisome ledger, for the throbbing brow and dimmed eye. Beardless clerks make a jest of “the old boy;” superciliously repeating, in his sensitive ear, their mutual master’s orders. With them he meekly receives his weekly pittance; sighing, as he counts it over, to think of the few comforts it will bring to the drooping hearts at home. Foot-weary, he travels through the crowded streets; his threadbare coat, and napless hat, and dejected face, all unnoticed by the thriving young merchant, whom the old man helped to his present prosperous business position. The birth-days of his delicate daughter come and go, all unmarked by the joy-bestowing gift. With trouble and exposure, sickness comes at last: then, the tardy foot, and careless, professional touch of the callous-hearted dispensary doctor: then, the poor man’s hearse stands before the door; then winds unheeded through busy streets, to the “Potter’s field,” while his former cotemporaries take up the daily paper, and sipping their wine, say carelessly, as if they had a quit-claim from sorrow, “Well, Old Smith, the broken-down millionaire, is dead.”

Ah, there are tragedies of which editors and printers little dream, woven in their daily advertising sheets: the office boy feeds the fire with many a tear-blotted manuscript, penned by trembling fingers, all unused to toil.

A MOVING TALE

The Smiths have just been moving. They always move “for the last time,” on the first of May. “Horrid custom!” exclaims Smith, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and pulling up his depressed dickey. “How my blood curdles and my bones ache, at the thought!” It was on Tuesday, the third of May, that the afflicting rite was celebrated. Cartmen – four of them – were engaged the Saturday previous, to be on hand at six o’clock on Tuesday morning, to transport the household goods from the habitation of ’52-3 to that of ’53-4. Smith was to pay them three dollars each – twelve dollars in all. They would not come for a mill less; Smith tried them thoroughly.

On Monday, Smith’s house is turned into a sort of Bedlam, minus the beds. They are tied up, ready for the next morning’s Hegira; the Smiths sleeping on the floor on Monday night. Smith can’t sleep on the floor; he grows restless; he receives constant reminders from Mrs. Smith to take his elbow out of the baby’s face; he has horrid visions and rolls about: therefore, he is not at all surprised, on waking at cock-crow, to find his head in the fire-place, and his hair powdered with soot. The occasion of his waking at that time, was a dream of an unpleasant nature. He dreamed that he had rolled off the world backwards, and lodged in a thorn-bush. Of course, such a thing was slightly improbable; but how could Smith be responsible for a dream?

On Tuesday morning, the Smiths are up with the dawn. The household being mustered, it is found that the servant girl, who had often averred that, “she lived out, just for a little exercise,” had deserted her colors. The grocer on the corner politely informs Smith, (whom Mrs. S. had sent on an errand of inquiry) that, on the night previous, the servant left with him a message for her employers, to the effect that “she didn’t consider moving the genteel thing, at all; and that a proper regard for her character and position in society, had induced her to get a situation in the family of a gentleman who owned the house he lived in.”

This is severe: Smith feels it keenly; Mrs. Smith leans her head against her husband’s vest pattern, and says “She is quite crushed,” and “wonders how Smith can have the heart to whistle. But, it is always so,” she remarks. “Woman is the weaker vessel, and man delights to trample on her.” Smith indignantly denies this sweeping assertion, and says “he tramples on nothing;” when Mrs. Smith points to a bandbox containing her best bonnet, which he has just put his foot through. Smith is silent.

The cartmen were to be on the premises at six o’clock. Six o’clock comes – half-past six – seven o’clock – but no cartmen. Here is a dilemma! The successors to the Smiths are to be on the ground at eight o’clock; and being on the ground, they will naturally wish to get into the house; which they cannot well do, unless the Smiths are out of it.

Smith takes a survey of his furniture, with a feeling of intense disgust. He wishes his cumbrous goods were reduced to the capacity of a carpet-bag, which he could pick up and walk away with. The mirrors and pianoforte are his especial aversion. The latter is a fine instrument, with an Eolian attachment. He wishes it had a sheriff’s attachment; in fact, he would have been obliged to any officer who should, at that wretched moment, have sold out the whole establishment, at the most “ruinous sacrifice,” ever imagined by an auctioneer’s fertile “marvelousness.”