Caper Sauce Part 9

I wish I were a voter: I would vote for the officials who would take a little interest in the household ash-barrel. It may be too much to ask that the McGormicks, and McCormicks, and O'Flahertys, who are paid for emptying these utensils--when it don't rain, and when they don't forget it--should not empty the contents on the pavement, and then half shovel them up, to save themselves the exertion of lifting the barrels, which they always throw down upon their sides, to roll wheresoever the G.o.ds or idle boys will. It may be too much to ask that they should amend their ways in these particulars; but were every lady housekeeper a voter, as, thank Providence, they are sure to be some day or other, these gentlemen would either have to toe the mark, or be run over by the new wheel of progress.

Meantime, it is of little use for Bridget to sweep the sidewalk, or keep the gutter free, as she often pathetically remarks to me, when she goes forth to perform this matutinal duty. Now, as the tools used in my profession keep sharper and freer from rust, in the air of Manhattan, than elsewhere, I cannot be expected to vacate for the dry-dirt-man. The only alternative that I know of is, that _he_ shall vacate for me, and make room for more executive officials. That's logic, if it is feminine. In short, I want those men to take a little journey somewhere--I'm not particular where, so that they don't come back.

It grows clearer to me, every day, as I observe these one-horse arrangements, why women are not allowed to vote: there would be little margin then for all this cheating, this pocketing of salaries without an equivalent. The sidewalks, gutters, streets would be as clean as a parlor floor. No old boxes, or kegs, or boots and shoes, past their prime, would challenge our eyes, or our noses. The drinking-places would be disgorged of husbands, fathers, lovers, and brothers; also the billiard and gambling saloons. In short, the broom of reform would raise such a dust in the eyes of the _how-not-to-do-its_, that, when their vision was restored, they would ask, like the old woman whose skirts were curtailed while taking her nap, if "this be I?"

Meantime I wait--not patiently--for this millennium. It galls me--this dirt and thriftlessness--more in the Autumn than at any other time. In the Spring it is sufficiently odious; but then one is on the wing for the country, and that hope buoys a housekeeper under it. In the Winter the friendly, pure white snow comes, with its heavenly mantle of charity, to cover it sometimes. But who or what shall comfort the housekeeper in the lingering, golden days of the Indian Summer, when fresh from the pure air of the country, and the brilliant foliage of the valleys, and the lovely shadows on the hillsides, she is doomed to see, to smell, to breathe whatever of pollution and unthrift our city fathers choose, without the power to cast the vote that shall give us a clean city?

Meantime, as I say, I wait--_not_ patiently--for that desired millennium; and shall continue, with a touching faith in it, to keep flowering plants in my windows, and in other ways to signify, to the pa.s.ser-by, that dirt and unsightliness, and bad odors, are not and never have been, the normal condition of _woman_.

OUR MORNING MEAL.--Breakfast should be the most enlivening meal of the whole day, for then we are to be nerved for another day's duties and cares, and perhaps for great sorrows also. Let there be no exciting argument, from which personalities may crop out, around the breakfast table. Let there be, if possible, only pleasant topics, and affectionate salutations, that all may go forth their separate ways with sweet, peaceful memories of each other; for some foot may never again cross the family threshold, some eye never witness another day's dawning. This thought, if the busy world were not so clamorous as to stifle it, would often arrest the impatient, fretful words that pain so many tender hearts.

_MODERN MARTYRS._

Fox's cheerful "Book of Martyrs" strikes us as incomplete. He tells, to be sure, of people who have been roasted alive, cut up, torn limb from limb, disembowelled, and suffered various other trifling annoyances of that kind; but though I have perused it carefully, I see no mention of the unhappy wretch who, coming home at twelve o'clock at night, with frozen fingers, gropes round his room, b.u.mping his nose, and extinguis.h.i.+ng his eyes, in the vain search for his match-box, the lat.i.tude and longitude of which some dastardly miscreant has changed.

Nor do I see any mention of him who, having washed his hands nicely, looketh in vain for a towel, where a towel _should_ be, while little rivulets of water run up his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves or drip from his extended finger-tips. No allusion either is made to her who, sitting down to her time-honored portfolio, misseth one sheet of MS. which somebody has fluttered out, and straightway gone his heedless way. Nor yet of the unhappy owner of a pen, whose pace answers only to one hand, and whose nib has been tampered with by some idle scribbler, in multiplying the name of "Laura," or "Matilda," to an indefinite extent, over a sheet of paper as blank as his mind. I see no mention of her who, sitting down to write, is made frantic by the everlasting grind of a hand-organ beneath the window; that performer's welcome retreat being followed by a shaky old man with a wheezy flute, or the more horrible bagpipe performance, compared with which the shrieks of twenty cur-tailed cats were heaven's own music. I have not noticed any mention of her who, giving her husband a letter to drop into the post, finds the same a month afterwards in the pocket of a vest, which he tosses her to mend. I see no mention of the lady-victims of owners of shops, three miles long, who have always "_just the article you want_" at the very farthest extremity of the store; and whom they lure to traverse that distance only to find something in the _shopman's_ view "infinitely superior," but about as near the article wanted as is the North to the South pole. No mention either is made of the gentleman with a bran new coat, who takes the last seat in the car, next a child fond of wriggling, with a piece of soft gingerbread or a moist stick of candy in its uncertain gripe. Nor is any allusion made to the friend of the family, who furnishes all the children with holiday toys, every one of which has either a crucifying squeak or a stunning explosive power, which soon fits their amiable mother for a lunatic asylum. Nothing is said, as I can find, of that mistress of a family to whom the morning hours are as precious as gold dust, and who is called down to see a gentleman, who (having read _Jones_ on the door-plate) straightway, with sublime a.s.surance, asks "for _Mrs._ Jones, on particular business;" when that lady, descending, finds a well-dressed, well-groomed individual, who, with a smirk and a bow, straightway draws from his pocket "a bottle of furniture polish,"

which he exhausts all the dictionary and her patience in extolling; or presents to her notice a "cement for broken china," or "samples of needles." Scarcely has she rid herself of this nuisance, when "a boy wishes also to see _Mrs. Jones_ on particular business," which turns out to be the hoped-for sale of "six envelopes, two steel-pens, a pencil, a bra.s.s breast-pin, a tin trumpet, a corkscrew, and four sheets of letter-paper--all for sixpence--_and just sold three next door, mum_."

Is not the boarding-house public an army of martyrs? As to boarding-house life, I detest it every way: its public feeding, its scandal, its heterogeneousness, its tyrannical edicts against babies and young children, its stifling atmosphere of roast, and boil, and stew, and tobacco-smoke, its punctual delivery of your letters and parcels, _on the entry table_; its way of sweeping your room at most inconvenient hours, and dusting it with one summary whisk from a long-handled, feather-tailed switch; its convenient deafness to the jerk of your bell-wire; its h.o.m.oeopathic coffee and pie; its towels, threadbare in quality, and n.i.g.g.ardly in quant.i.ty; its parlor, showy and shabby, with its inevitable centre-table, with its perennial annuals, its hump-backed rocking-chair, and distorted pictures--and apoplectic bills.

The necessity it entails of always wearing a mask; of fearing to speak, lest you should tread on the toes of your neighbor's pet hobby, and thereby deprive yourself of the convenient bridge over which the salt and pepper must necessarily travel to your plate, waiters being stupid and scarce; the bore of talking when you feel taciturn, or having your neighbor provokingly insist upon it that you must be ill; the bore of laughing when you feel sad, and hearing threadbare topics rediscussed, and stale jokes resurrectionized; the misery of never being able to have the first unfolding of your own morning-paper, or of having it incontinently disappear, in company with some unprincipled boarder bound on a daybreak journey, and that day sure to be aggravatingly dull and rainy; the necessity of always turning your keys upon boxes and trunks, and the certainty of losing or misplacing them when you are in a double-twisted, insane hurry; your contracted, closetless s.p.a.ce; your inevitable city window prospect of back sheds, with ghostly garments hanging on groaning clothes-lines; of distracted bachelors at upper chamber-windows, vainly essaying to sew on missing b.u.t.tons, and muttering inaudible oaths at their clumsy, needle-p.r.i.c.ked fingers.

Now, if you needs must board, go to the biggest and best hotel you can find, where everybody is too much occupied to interfere with your personal business; where waiters are plenty, and it is not high treason to ask for salt with your meat. If your finances forbid this, then, in mercy to yourself, rent a shanty where no third person is a fixture in your family, where you can sneeze when your nose has a call that way, and where your hopes and fears, joys and sorrows will not be leisurely dissected by the cool fingers of malignity, and where that nightmare, Paul Pry-ism, is not always astride of your heart and brain.

That's my opinion of boarding-houses, and may the G.o.ds have mercy on the _bored_. Let us have a new edition of Fox at once.

AN ERROR TO AVOID.--All writers do best who depict that which they have seen with their own eyes, instead of their "mind's eye." It is very easy to detect the difference. There is a glow, a naturalness, a fidelity to life in the first, that is never to be found in the last. And yet how many, stepping past their own legitimate points of observation, and looking only through the fog of imagination, give us dim, distorted, crude caricatures of life and human beings, the counterpart of which never has and never will exist. This is especially the fault of beginners, whose misdirected aim it is to startle and astonish.

_WRITING "COMPOSITIONS."_

I have lately received a letter which it would be well every teacher and parent in the land should read. As I shall not betray the name or residence of the distressed young writer, of whom I have no knowledge except what is communicated by her letter, and as it may call attention to the last-drop-in-the-bucket misery, inflicted upon children already sufficiently overtasked, who are required to furnish ideas upon a given subject, which it is utterly impossible their young minds should grasp, I shall make no apology for transcribing it verbatim; calling particular attention to the italicized pa.s.sages:

"DEAR AUNT f.a.n.n.y:--You have said you are Auntie to all poor girls in distress. I am in distress, if ever anybody was; and I know that you will be kind to me. Let me tell you about it. I have expected to graduate in about two weeks; and I have no essay to read, and if I don't have one I can't graduate. I would not care so much for that myself, but my father would be _so_ disappointed; and he has made so many sacrifices to keep me at school, that I _can't_ disappoint him. Oh! I have worked so hard to keep up with my cla.s.s, for I am obliged to be absent so much, and now if I can't go through, _I shall die, I know_. I am not afraid of pa.s.sing examination, for I know I can do that successfully, but I never could write any kind of a decent composition; and now it seems as though it was worse than ever, for _I have tried for four months to write one, but I am farther off from it than ever_. I know that you will think me very, _very_ dull, and I suppose I am; but, oh!

Aunt f.a.n.n.y, _do, do_ pity me. Please, _please_ write me one to read--_you_ can do it in a very short time. I know that it is a very great favor to ask of you, and I should not dare to do it, but oh! I am almost crazy, and I know by your writings that you will pity and help me. I pray every night that G.o.d will help me, and I think He put it into my heart to write to you about it. I have tried everything. Oh, dear! I can't write on anything at all. _I have sat up all night, but I am as dull as ever, and I dream about it when I go to sleep._ Oh! Aunt f.a.n.n.y, do, _do_ pity me, and write for me. I will do anything in this wide world for you. Oh, please, do; I will never forget you. You can do anything almost; I will bless you forever. _Oh, I shall die if I don't have one!_ Do write me a line, anyway, and direct to ----, ----. Excuse me for writing so, but I am nearly desperate. _Oh, for the love of G.o.d, do write me one in two weeks, or at most three!_ I dare not even read over what I have written to you. Oh! Aunt f.a.n.n.y, don't refuse me."

A better comment than this touching letter, upon the present forcing, hot-house system of education, even I should not desire. Think of this young girl, goaded to the very verge of insanity by those who _should know_ that they are defeating the very object they are trying to attain by forcing the young mind to string together to order, and by the page, _words without ideas_. In my opinion this "composition" business is the greatest possible nonsense. I believe it to be the baneful root of the inflated style of writing so prevalent. I believe that there are exercises in English, which would serve the purpose millions of times better without driving pupils mad, and without offering them a premium for deceit, in pa.s.sing off as their own the thoughts of others. Not long since, I received a letter from the princ.i.p.als of a school, enclosing "a composition" to which "a prize" had just been awarded, and which some person present at the reading had detected as stolen from one of my books; with a request that I would look it over and p.r.o.nounce upon the same. I found it word for word as I had written it in my book! Perhaps the _moral_ effect of this system may be worth inquiring into, even by those who seem to be utterly insensible to the wretched spectacle of a young head tossing feverishly, night after night, on the pillow, under the brooding nightmare of an unwritten "_composition_." Let careless parents, who are quite as much to blame as teachers, give this subject a thought.

Now, girls, I fully sympathize with you in your distractions in this dilemma, but this is not the way to help you out of it. I advise you to ask your teacher to allow you to describe some scene or place you have visited, which you could easily do; then write it out naturally, as if you were telling it to some friend, without any attempt at fine language. Also ask your teacher to allow you _to stop when you get through_, instead of exacting so many lines or pages when your ideas give out. That is the only way that good "compositions" can be written, and I wish fervently all school-teachers knew it, and ceased bothering poor young heads "to make bricks without straw," or resort in their distress to the deception you propose to me.

"Composition day," it is true, in my school-days, was only a delight to me. But you should have seen the idiot I was in arithmetic or algebra, or historical dates! How I pinched the girl next me to help me out; and how gratefully I remembered it, in after years, and embroidered my grat.i.tude on her first baby's little flannel petticoats!

Now, my dear young ladies, don't be discouraged because you are slow at "composition." As I say, it is not your fault, for half the time the most impossible subjects are given you to write about. Your minister might just as well be asked to write a dissertation on French millinery.

Then, though your gift may not be "composition," it may lie in something quite as important; so with this little consolation I leave you to wriggle out of your dilemma the best way you can, without pilfering.

And, moreover, I think a meeting of school-teachers ought speedily to be called to consider this composition subject and make it, as easily might be done, a delight, instead of a bore and a cheat.

THE LITTLE ONES.--Fortunate are those parents who have learned to respect the _individuality_ of their children. Who are not madly bent upon planting them in the family garden in set rows, and so closely that their branches have no room to stretch out into the fair sunlight. Who are not forever on hand with the pruning-knife or hoe, to lop off that which, if left, would develop into sweet buds or flowers; or to dig the earth prematurely from roots which were better left safely hidden till their natural period of vigorous appearing. A gardener who should be guilty of such folly would be a laughing-stock. What if all his flowers were of one color? What if every twig and leaf were of the same size?

How weary should we be of this monotony. How we should long for the delicate pink of the rose, and the royal purple of the violet, and the pure snow of the lily, and the distinctive aroma of each! Why not in this respect take a lesson from Nature, which is at once so bountiful and so wise?

_NICE LITTLE TEA-PARTIES._

Hospitality seems to be an extinct virtue. Grand parties we have in plenty of all kinds, where those who have vitality sufficient to attend them, and purses long enough to compete with the vulgar show attending them, may return such hollow civilities, and "have it over," as they express it.

"_Have it over!_" There's just the fly in the ointment. The old-fas.h.i.+oned, genuine hospitality never was "over." n.o.body wanted it "over." A simple, elegant little tea, a well-cooked, well-served, plain family dinner, one's friend was always welcome to join, without a printed card of invitation weeks beforehand, accompanied with a whispered, "I hope to gracious they won't accept!" But that, alas! is all in the past. Fas.h.i.+on has decreed an elaborate show of food, dishes, and dress. Families pinch themselves a whole year for one grand display of this kind, in the endeavor to compete with those whose means perhaps may justify this barren style of entertaining, and where stupefaction and a consequent lack of intelligent conversation are the only result, save a long bill of expense. The consequence is, that people whose time is valuable, and whose vitality is too precious to expend in this way, refuse all such invitations. But the unfortunate part of it is, that many of them do not revive the old simple hospitality; and when expostulated with upon setting a better example, only reply, that the prevailing taste for show has so vitiated everything, that there are few who care to go where it is not the order of the entertainment.

Now we don't believe this. We have too often heard sensible, cultivated, refined men and women deplore it, to credit this idea. But they are in the maelstrom; Mrs. So and So is a particular friend, and "she thinks she must go through with this vulgar parade," or, "her husband likes it;" and "they think every time that they accept, they never will do it again, even for her," etc. Now it isn't that there are "few who don't like it:" but it _is_ true that there are few who have the independence to inaugurate a different state of things--to be _truly_ hospitable without excessive upholstery, or gastronomy, or fine millinery.

To my mind, there is something better than sitting hours to see servants dexterously place and take away dishes. One sees that at home in lesser degree, and with less waste of time. One can converse with one's hostess there, and she will not answer at random, because her mind is occupied with processions of birds and sugar and wines. Little children's faces, like flowers, are there, in place of a stiff bouquet of flowers and silver pyramids obscuring one's _vis-a-vis_. _There_ is a home flavor which puts the most modest guest at ease, and permits him or her to bring forth something in the way of conversation that is not the inflamed product of half a dozen kinds of wine--something to remember and think of afterward with pleasure, instead of blus.h.i.+ng next day to a.s.sociate with the speaker.

I say there are people, and the best kind of people too, who _much_ prefer this style of entertainment; but they should not rest there. They should inaugurate something better in their place, instead only of retiring in disgust under the shelter of their own roofs, and living only for their own family circles. They owe a duty also to society, and it should be paid by setting a sensible example of old-fas.h.i.+oned simplicity in hospitality, which in time may reform this matter. People who value their brains want them in decent condition for the next morning, and the next morning after that, and cannot afford to waste them in this manner. It is a matter of dollars and cents with them, I'd have you to know, as well as a matter of taste; if, indeed, I may be pardoned for putting forward an idea so practical. They wish to retire early, for one thing; they prefer out-door air for another, when they are off duty with the pen, instead that of a close, stifled room, and the spectacle of feeding and drinking till sense and wit give out. This is plain talking, but it won't hurt you, my friends, to have a little occasionally.

_A SLEEPLESS NIGHT._

You know what it is to lie awake at night, I suppose, while every lumpish human creature in the house is sleeping, regardless of the perspiration standing in drops on your bewitched forehead; regardless of your twitching fingers, and kicking toes, and glaring, distended eyes; regardless of your increasing disgust at each miserable moment at the monotonous tap, tap, tap, of solitary heels on the forsaken sidewalk; regardless of your meditated vengeance on the morrow, should you perchance survive to see it, upon the owner of that flapping-blind across the way, which has been slamming fore-and-aft all night, and yet never dropped, as you hoped it might, on somebody's or anybody's head--you didn't care whose, so that you might have been delivered from the nuisance.

In vain have you tried the humbugging recipe of saying the Multiplication Table; in vain have you repeated poetry by the yard, or counted one hundred; in vain have you conjugated verbs, or done any of the foolish things recommended in such cases. _Two_ o'clock has just struck, and no somniferous result has followed. Well--if you can't sleep, you _won't_ sleep, that's all. You'll just get up, and strike a light and read. You do it; but the fire is low, and cold s.h.i.+vers run up and down your back-bone. You're hungry! yes--that must be it. You'll go to the closet, and get a bit of cold chicken you wot of. Good heavens!

if those lumpish, snoring wretches haven't devoured it before going to bed. You go look at the creature vindictively; _you_ know just who would be capable of such a meanness. She has slept there these three hours, on the strength of that bit of purloined chicken--_your_ chicken--while you haven't closed an eyelash. She _will_ sleep comfortably till daylight; and get up with a clear head, and refreshed limbs, to breakfast. Then she will eat, like a great healthy animal, while food looks perfectly nauseous to you, who will then be too exhausted to be hungry. You look at the creature again, and think of Judith and Holofernes; and don't wonder as you used at Judith. Indeed, she seems to you at that moment rather an estimable person than otherwise; and as to pitying Holofernes, why should _you_ pity anybody who could _sleep_?

You walk to the window. It is some comfort that the stars have to wink all night as well as you. And there's a policeman, dragging up and down in the cold, and clapping his hands across his breast to keep warm.

Good! you're glad of it. Four o'clock! Gracious! how you _will_ feel to-morrow. If you only had a bottle of ale to make you stupid and drowsy. And sure enough, now you think of it, there is just one left.

You seize it! Why--somebody has unwired the cork. Merciful man! it is only _Ink_. Now, that's a little too much for a tired soul. Suppose you should begin and run from the top of the stairs to the bottom, as fast and as loud as you could, and wake up the whole family. And as the vision of terrified night-gowns rises before your mental vision, you commence grinning noiselessly like a maniac; then laughing hysterically; then crying outright; and the next thing you know it is eight o'clock in the morning, and coffee and rolls and beefsteak are awaiting your advent.