LETTERS
OF
PEREGRINE PICKLE

BY

GEORGE P. UPTON.

"This, That and the Other."

CHICAGO:
THE WESTERN NEWS COMPANY,
121 and 123 State Street.
1869

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
THE WESTERN NEWS COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the
Northern District of Illinois.

Printed by J. Waddington,
121 Madison Street, Chicago, Ill.

To My Wife,
WHOSE
Sympathy and Encouragement
HAVE CONSTANTLY WELCOMED AND FOLLOWED
THESE LETTERS,
This Volume
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.

PREFACE.

THE contents of this book originally appeared in the columns of the Chicago Tribune, in the form of weekly letters, over the nom de plume of "Peregrine Pickle," devoted to matters of gossip and interest in the world of amusement. Necessarily, much of this matter was of an ephemeral nature, which perished with publication. Many of these letters, also, were devoted to topics of a purely local and temporary character, which, at this present date, would possess no interest. I have, therefore, taken care to preserve only such parts of them as have a general bearing, and have arranged them under appropriate heads, with dates at the end of each, as a matter of convenience and reference.

These letters were commenced in the early part of the winter of 1866-'67, and have, therefore, reached the very respectable age of nearly three years. Like other children, they are old enough to go alone, and I therefore send them out into the world, richly endowed with my blessings, which is all I have to give them. Should they succeed in the world, I shall be profoundly astonished, as they were born amidst the press and hurry of other editorial duties, and they came into the world scarce half made up. Should they fail, I shall at least have the gratification of showing that Lytton Bulwer was in error in regard to the lexicon of youth.

The characters—Old Blobbs and Mrs. Blobbs, Aurelia, Celeste, Mignon, Blanche, Boosey, Fitz-Herbert, and the Maiden Aunt—whom the reader will find in these pages, may be real or not, as the reader fancies. None of them are willing, however, to have me divulge their real names, as that would destroy the little mystery which envelopes our breakfast gatherings, and would put us ill at ease when talking with the reader, as we hope to do for some time to come, through the columns of the Tribune. Meanwhile, if the reader knows any large-hearted, large-handed man, who speaks very plainly and hates shams, it is quite possible that man is Old Blobbs. Mrs. Blobbs is a very good woman when she is severely let alone, and her ideas of etiquette are not shocked. Aurelia is a plain, practical, well-educated woman, who shed all her nonsense when her first baby made her appearance. Celeste is a little flighty, and would be a Girl of the Period, if that did not involve vulgarity. Mignon is the pet of our set, keenly alive to whatever is beautiful, always lively and always graceful, and Blanche is her companion—a quiet and lovable girl. Boosey is a good-hearted, weak-kneed young fellow, quite harmless and very self-opinionated, while Fitz-Herbert is an incapable we cannot shake off. The Maiden Aunt is not with us now, having gone to a better world than this. Perhaps the reader knows all these people. They are not difficult to find.

These pages may prove to you, oh! reader, but a garden overrun with weeds. Should you, however, find only one simple little flower worth laying away as a souvenir, my purpose will have been answered.

G. P. U.

Chicago, September 20, 1869.

CONTENTS.

[THE SEASON.]

THE backbone of the winter is broken. The Carnival is about over. The lights are going out and the curtain is about to be rung down. The Spring will soon come slowly up this way, and then Lent. We shall take off our masques, be good children, and moralize on the routs, the follies and frivolities of December, January and February; and moralizing, we shall pronounce the winter the gayest, wildest, most dashing and smashing Chicago has ever known.

The winter has been one perpetual ball and party. Private amusement has usurped the place of public, and as a consequence, concerts and operas have suffered. The poor Philharmonic has withered like a leaf under this neglect, and Strakosch has lost money at a frightful rate. Soiree, ball and party have succeeded each other with wonderful rapidity, and the belles have been literally kept whirling until they are worn out and pine for the grateful Lent, when they can rest and get ready for the watering places.

The milliners, mantua-makers, dress-makers, hair-dressers, and others who make such exquisite fits and tremendous bills, have been in clover. The young ladies sometimes, after a season of only one night, come home so smashed that there is little left of their light fabrics and heavy waterfalls. Papa's purse has bled freely, while mamma, who will wear a train and try to eclipse her daughter, gets trodden on and banged up and has to go into the toilet dry dock quite often for repairs. This is the reason why the milliner et al. high-priced individuals have been happy and old Blobbs has staid away from evening meetings and, growling at the fire-screen, made an Ursa Major of himself.

So we go. Young Boosey and Aurelia care little for the tariff, reconstruction, high church controversy, tax bills and legislative stealings. They are optimists. They want the best, and they want it now while the purse holds out. They have had a gay winter, will dawdle along through the spring and leave us just in time to escape the hot weather and the cholera, and we shall miss them as we miss the butterflies, and hail their return as they come back in the fall for another winter campaign. I do not know that they build many houses, endow many colleges, teach many Sunday school classes or consume much calico and cold water; but then the streets would be very monotonous, and the counter-jumpers would grow rusty and life would be tinted with ashes of roses without them.

February 16, 1867.

[SLEEPING IN CHURCH.]

I AM usually of a very philosophical temperament and preserve my equilibrium with a wonderful degree of success. I can resist even the blandishments of the tax-collector and never get up to boiling point, as it requires too much effort; but I have at last failed to retain my composure; and I have failed, because an unfortunate Irishman wandered into a church in Rhode Island and went to sleep and was sent to jail for ten days, not for going to church, but for going to sleep. He was not drunk. He did not even snore. He simply went to sleep like a good Christian. And this innovation upon the ancient rights of pew-holders, and especially of strangers, was endured by the parishioners without a murmur.

Now, if we are going to establish precedents about sleeping in church, wouldn't it be well to reverse the order of things? For instance, send every minister to jail for ten days who cannot keep his hearers awake. Or, send every architect, who builds churches without means of ventilation, to jail for the same length of time. If I am to be deprived of my customary nap at the head of the family pew, why, then I must go where preachers are less somnolent or stay at home and take my nap, and thereby diminish the revenues of the church. And if all the heads which nod assent so vigorously to the preacher's premises, are to be deprived of their siestas, what will become of the preachers? Does good old Deacon Jones, who always wakes up in time to pass the contribution box, intend to encourage this state of things? Does good sister Jones, who drowses just a trifle, notwithstanding her smelling-bottle, vote in favor of it?

I never heard of but one man before, who was punished for sleeping in church, and he was Eutychus, I believe, who was sitting in an open window, and falling into a deep sleep, had a worse fall than that, by falling out of the window. Now, Eutychus was a very foolish young man to go to sleep in an open window, and deserved his punishment for his stupidity, but there is little danger of any one suffering in that manner now-a-days, for an open window in a church is as rare as a church without a contribution box or a strawberry festival.

In another respect, this sleeping in church is a compliment to the minister. It indicates that his congregation are satisfied with the soundness of his doctrines and are willing to trust him alone. Suppose Brother Ryder should preach eternal damnation, or Brother Hatfield should announce universal salvation, or Brother Locke should advocate the elevation of the Host, would their parishioners do much sleeping?

Not much!

I feel for that unfortunate Milesian. I feel that in his punishment, landmarks are swept away and that an old established usage, sanctified by the experience of immemorial ages, is overturned.

March 2, 1867.

[THE ORGAN GRINDER.]

HE is the child of sunny Italy, and it is to be regretted that he is not with his parents.

Likewise his monkey.

I was reminded this morning that Spring is slowly coming up this way, by meeting him and his organ and his red-blanketted monkey; and the air was full of the infernal jangle and din, ground out by that remorseless man; and as I passed along I reflected.

Does the Italian take naturally to the hand-organ? Is he born with the crank and the monkey in his mouth? What sin has he committed that he should be compelled to tramp, making day and night hideous? What becomes of him in winter? Where does he live? Does he go where the flies go? Is he preserved in amber from Autumn to Spring? You see him on one of the last days of Autumn. A biting wind the next day and the birds are gone. If you ask me what becomes of him, I will answer, I will tell you, when you tell me what becomes of all the hoop-skirts. Does the Organ-Grinder go to church? Does he pay taxes? Are there a Mrs. Organ-Grinder and little Organ-Grinders bringing up little monkeys to the business? Do they live in houses, or do they burrow in the ground? Where do they go when they die? In fact, do they ever die? Are they not like the wandering Jew, compelled to keep moving, grinding as they go?

These questions are worthy of consideration. There is only one thing certain about him. He is as resistless as fate. Give him a penny to go away and he will come the next day for a similar favor. Threaten to shoot him and he will laugh at you. Buttons and board-nails are just as current with him as pennies. Tell him your family are at the point of death, and he will grind out a soothing strain and come the next day with several more of his tribe to play a dirge at the funeral. I think I can eat a frugal meal with a Digger Indian; I am even prepared to recognize the greasy Esquimaux and horse-eating Gauls, but I cannot recognize a man and brother in the Organ-Grinder.

He is one of those mysterious dispensations like the cholera, rinderpest and trichiniasis which only future ages may appreciate. Undoubtedly he has his mission. Undoubtedly there are people who dote on the Organ-Grinder and the organ and the monkey and are soothed with the touching story of "Old Dog Tray." Undoubtedly there was an old woman who kissed a cow; and there are people at the antipodes who eat mice and other small deer.

Such patience, determination, humility and industry, if applied to the Foreign Missions, would speedily clothe every Fiji sinner in a flannel jacket and his right mind. Were such attachments as exist between the Organ-Grinder and his monkey more common, we should rapidly approach the Millenium. Tramp on, then, O! Organ-Grinder! Tramp on, O! monkey! It is meet we should be taught patience.

April 13, 1867.

[A RETROSPECT.]

THE young ladies have commenced doing a very naughty thing, which is nothing more nor less than inserting a looking-glass on the inner side of the book of "Common Prayer." It is so handy you know, when you are saying the responses, to pay your little devotions to the mirror, for how can one say the responses aright if her strings are fluttered or her chignon awry? And then you know you can get reflections from Celeste over in the next slip and examine her toilet and all the time be looking at your Prayer Book, like a good child. For combining the altar and the toilet, there is nothing like it. When the Rector intimates that Aurelia is a worm of the dust, she will look at her chignon and think of the gregarines. When he cautions her against pride, the sweet little Pharisee will glance at Celeste's shadow and be thankful that she is not as proud as C. But when she lisps the confession to her looking-glass, will she discover that she has left undone the things she ought to have done, and be miserable all through the service? And when the Rector says: "Keep thy foot when thou goest into the house of God *** and offer not the sacrifice of fools," will she see a fool in the looking-glass?

Which reminds me to say that I shall go to the Old Folks' Concert on Monday night; and I shall revive the recollection of those days when Hepzibah, in a blue calico, sang treble and turned up her nose at Prudence, in bombazine, who sang second and always went off the key in the fugue; of those days when Zephaniah played bass viol with an unctuous, solemn sound, and sister Brown thought it was about time that Huldy Perkins published her banns if she was ever "a-goin 'ter"; when old Deacon Jones couldn't sleep well through the sermon, the "tarnal" flies "pestered him so;" when my aunt, in a black silk that would stand alone, and a white cap over those gray locks that are now strangely twisted among the roots of the daisies, always made the chorister mad when they sang Coronation because she couldn't get through the quirl in the final "Lord," without running off the track and wrecking half the congregation. There was a great deal of talk about this failing of my aunt's at the sewing bees, and it occasioned hard feelings between her and the chorister, but I have no doubt they have settled it now, and sing a great deal better than they did when they were in the flesh.

At least, I hope they do.

April 27, 1867.

[WHITED SEPULCHRES.]

ALTHOUGH Aurelia has had a great deal on her mind during the past two or three days in getting ready for the Opera, she did not fail to remind me this morning, over her muffins, that I had agreed to say something about male whited sepulchres.

She also did not fail to remind me that mite parties, sewing societies, private musical soirees, young ladies' charitable institutions, ladies' aid societies, and other mild forms of social delirium on which the Women of America dote, had unanimously declared I was "too bad" and that it was "a shame."

If by some happy coincidence, I shall secure a similar state of feeling on the part of the Board of Trade, the Young Mens' Debating Society, the Society for the Propagation of Knowledge in Bridgeport, the Good Templars, the Masonic Lodges, the Turners, the late Philharmonic Society, and other mild forms of masculine gregariousness—on which the Men of America dote, I shall account myself fortunate.

Thus I said to Aurelia, as she rose from her muffins to once more endeavor to find the place in Swinburne's last poem, which she lost some days ago. The Dear Creature thinks it a duty she owes society to read Swinburne, but whenever she stops reading, she always loses her place, so that her reading of Swinburne is likely to prove the latest style of perpetual motion.

Persuading her to forego Swinburne for a few minutes, I took the Dear Child into my den, the only part of the house which has thus far escaped the innovations of Mrs. Grundy, and I said to her:

My Dear Child, you have hitherto formed your opinions of men from the samples furnished you at one dollar and fifty cents each, selected from the artificial articles concocted by Miss Muloch, Miss Bronte, Miss Evans, Dumas pere, Henry Ward Beecher and others. You know very little of the real article, for which reason I will catalogue a few of the best specimens of masculine whited sepulchres.

Old Gunnybags, who sits at the head of his pew every Sunday morning, pretending to listen to the preacher, but in reality thinking of the invoice of sugar to arrive Monday morning; who contributes certain sums for the conversion of the Siamese, but kicks the beggar from his door; who wreathes his face with smiles when he sees old Tea Chest in the next slip and in reality hates him because T. C. holds his I. O. U.; who reads the Confession very unctuously and pronounces the Amen very sonorously, at the same time inwardly cursing his next brown-stone-front neighbor, who got ahead of him in a bargain, on Saturday; who is all things to all men and a grindstone to the individual—he is a whited sepulchre and the sepulchre is full of hypocrisy.

Mr. Cutaswell, who orders his claret at fifty dollars a dozen and superfluous lace for his wife at as many dollars a yard; who drives the fastest bays on the avenue; who takes an opera box for the season; who imports pictures from Germany and cooks from France; who goes to Saratoga every summer and gives stunning soirees every winter; who does all these things when he ought to be paying his "calls"—he is a whited sepulchre, and the sepulchre is full of swindling.

Old Muslin D. Laine, who smiles and smirks and bows to and fawns upon his customers, and grinds his clerks into the dust; who hands My Lady to her carriage with gracious, grinning suavity, and grinds the noses of his employees; who irritates, goads and worries his clerks with regulations as petty as they are tyrannical; who exacts constant, unremitting toil to the uttermost second, alike in rain and sunshine, in a store full of customers and a store empty; who pays a man well for doing woman's work, and pays a woman a pittance for doing the same; who plays the petty tyrant over the slaves of his counter—he is a whited sepulchre, and his sepulchre is full of those who will confront him at the Great Assize.

Rev. Augustus Fitz-Herbert, who pays more attention to his linen than to his text; who parts his hair with more care than he writes his discourses; who is sweet at a wedding and ravenish at a funeral; who toadies to his wealthy parishioners; who consigns the poor devil to eternal torment and glosses over the failings of Crœsus; who takes to the young ladies' aid societies and neglects the maternal meetings; who, in the capacity of a shepherd, prefers a tender young ewe to a faithful old sheep; who feeds fat on the good things of earth and forgets those in the highways and byways; who can tell you the last new ritualistic fashion of robe, but knows little of the spiritual fashion of the great congregation—he is a whited sepulchre, and his sepulchre is full of deceit.

Young Boosey, who is the product of the tailor and the bootmaker, and never saw either of their autographs; who wears immaculate mutton-chops and swallow-tails; who varies with each changing wind of fashion; who simpers and lolls in your opera-box, my Dear Child, talks very softly in your ear, and is vulgar and profane away from you; whose highest ambition reaches his neck-tie and whose idea of Paradise is a place where all the good fellows go, to dress and show themselves to the female cherubs and angels—he is a whited sepulchre and his sepulchre is full of nothing.

There are other whited sepulchres, my dear Aurelia, whom you may detect by slight observation. They cannot conceal the fact that they are whited. Their exteriors are not even plausible, so dense is the growth of noxious weeds about them. You can easily test your true gentleman. He carries his colors in his face, in his walk, in his clothes, in his manners. You will not do well to accept every St. Elmo who comes along under the impression that he will turn out to be a parson. The St. Elmos who start off as scoundrels always remain so, Miss Evans notwithstanding. Cain was not the only man who had his forehead branded. And, if you look carefully, my dear, at the whited sepulchres, which are full of vice, you will discover the sign on the front door.

Aurelia, during the latter part of my homily, was a little fidgetty. She explained the cause of it to me. She had accepted young Boosey's invitation to Trovatore on Monday night. I consoled her by reminding her that his whited sepulchre was perfectly harmless. She might pick off all the roses and honeysuckles without detriment.

May 18, 1867.

[NOTHING AND BABIES.]

TO write about Something is no extraordinary feat; to write about Nothing is a feat not so easily performed.

I propose to write about Nothing, as I have Nothing to write.

Any one can be Something in the world. It requires genius to be Nothing.

There are a very few people who have succeeded in being Nothing. In order to be Nothing it is not necessary to know Nothing. In fact, it requires a great deal of knowledge to be Nothing. By assiduous effort for the past quarter of a century, more or less, I have thoroughly succeeded in being Nothing, and I am now quietly enjoying the otium cum dignitate which appertains to that blessed condition, and can quietly philosophize on nullity under my fig-tree, lying flat on my back gazing at Nothing. You restless people who are Something can have no idea of the absolute ecstasy—an ecstasy more intoxicating than Hasheesh or Cannabis Indica, and not so brutal and vulgar as Opium—which results from being Nothing—with Nothing on your mind, Nothing in your pockets, Nothing to think of, Nothing to do.

But I fancy old Scroggs, who has been doing Something all his life, and thereby has been a nuisance all his life, and Mrs. Scroggs, who is Chairwoman of the Society for the Regeneration of Fourth Avenue, and is more of a nuisance than old Scroggs—I fancy them saying that I am of no use in the world.

Am I not?

Suppose I think Nothing, then at least I think no evil of any one. Suppose I say Nothing good of any one, I say Nothing bad. If I have Nothing, I have no taxes to pay; no interest to collect; no houses to burn; nobody to gouge or harass, and nobody to gouge or harass me. Which is cheerful. If I am Nothing, no one cares for me, and equally I care for no one, so that no one and I are on good terms. Thus, you see, being Nothing, although I may accomplish no good in the world, I accomplish no evil. Every evil, every misery, every war, every misfortune, all the high taxes, all the poor operas, all the tough beefsteaks, all the sour Green Seal, all the fires, murders, explosions, and other such cheerful casualties, are the direct result of the efforts of these people who are Something.

Then, from a theological point of view, remember that if we were all Nothings, the Devil would have Nothing to do, and would have to let his fires go down and hang up his pitchforks, which would be a blessed thing for some of these people who are Somethings.

Nullity is the primal state of man. The Rev. Dr. Homilectics tries to impress upon me, each Sunday, the importance of going back to the days when Adam and Eve, in the latest cut of fig-leaves, played Romeo and Juliet under the apple-trees in Eden. He never stops to think that their innocence was the immediate result of being Nothing and doing Nothing, and that just as soon as they set out to be Something, they entailed the curse of work upon all mankind.

But I go further back than Adam and Eve. In the good old days of chaos, Nothing was in all its glory. It existed everywhere. No sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, No-thing. This was the normal condition.

And of what use was it? says Mrs. Increase, who is bringing up a large family of children, to be used hereafter as grindstones for other people's noses.

Why, my dear woman of facts and figures and spheres of usefulness, God Almighty took it and made this great world out of it, with all its mountains and rocks and rivers, its sunsets and rainbows and stars, its panorama of beauty by day and night, and you yourself, although you are, probably, but a very small and a very ugly part of this creation. Yes, madame, you and I came from this Nothing. I have retained this Nothing with great success. You, on the other hand, have been striving to change your normal condition by being Something. It is not for me to say whether you have succeeded. A great many people who think they are Something are really Nothing, and a poor kind of Nothing at that.

If I have said Nothing in writing on this subject, it was because I had Nothing to say. When one is writing about Nothing, you know, he is not expected to say anything.

Which reminds me of a baby. If you ask me how it reminds me, I cannot tell you. I only know that it reminds me of those little but important animals.

It is cheerful news for the future census-takers that babies have become fashionable in Paris. The "idea" will, of course, come immediately into fashion here. I do not mean French babies, but babies in the abstract. A baby is a good thing, a blessed thing. I cannot conceive what I should have done if I hadn't, once upon a time, been a baby. A baby is a well-spring, and the quantity of lacteal fluid, lumps of sugar, soothing syrups, paregoric, squills, squalls, walking the floor in your long-tailed night shirts, mother's loves, lovey-doveys, and square spanking that one of those well-springs will absorb is astonishing to one who has not had a baby. I have had several; at least, I own stock in several.

Would I sell my experience, past, present or future, in babies?

Not much.

Therefore, I am glad babies are going to come into fashion. Just think of the new topics of conversation, when Mrs. Brown takes her little three-months up to see Mrs. Jones and her two-months, and the two Dear Creatures compare colics. The little cherubs will mollify conversation, and sympathy will take the place of severity. Instead of gossiping on poor Mrs. Cauliflower's unfortunate but innocent faux pas, the Dear Creatures will soothingly compare notes on the baby question and discuss the merits of quieting syrups and puff-boxes. And then there will be the baby reunions, when the great parlor will be filled with baby chairs, and in each chair will be a baby in blue ribbon and white muslin, and in each little rosebud of a mouth will be thrust a dimpled fist. How pleasant it will be to listen to the artless conversation. When Mrs. Jones' baby says "goo," Mrs. Brown's baby will answer "goo, goo," and Mrs. Thompson's baby, whose mother is very talkative, will "goo" a steady stream for five minutes; and then, when one of the cherubs is affected to tears by the point of a pin, or an unusually sharp stroke of the colic, which by so many confiding young mothers has been taken for an angel talking to the little one, how will they all be affected to tears and the room resound with the dear little trebles.

But I must draw a veil over the picture. In the universal rush which will ensue for babies and the competitive result which will inevitably follow between ward and ward and street and street, there must be discrimination used. When Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Johnson sign articles of agreement as to an x number of babies in x time, Miss Aurelia and Miss Celeste must remember that, by the rules of the B. R., they are counted out. I would not advise all to adopt the fashion, but there are many, and there will be more, unless they adopt Swedenborg's notion of affinities, who can safely take up the new fashion.

And I recommend all such to adopt it immediately. As I said before, I don't know what I should have done if I hadn't been a baby.

June 8, 1867.

[THE CIRCUS.]

IT is safe to say that nine men out of ten—and the tenth man is to be sincerely pitied—looking back, find their starting point in a circus. Next to the maternal shoe, which hung in terrorem over the Lares and Penates, and which will never fade from the memory, my most distant recollection is beneath the canvass. Was there ever such a funny man as the clown? I hung upon his stale wit as Hamlet hung upon Yorick. Were there ever such angels as those ethereal, beautiful, gauzy, smiling women who rode round the ring—now, alas, bandy-legged, lath-armed, tinseled, painted, disconsolate looking creatures, whose whole world is within the narrow limits of the ring?

Did Arabia produce such fiery steeds, brave in gaily caparisoned trappings—now, poor old hacks, full of the spirit of the tread-mill—not all the yells of rider, clown and ringmaster, not all the brutal lashings of whip and thong, can force beyond their customary gait?

Were there ever such candies and cakes and pop corn as that boy peddled whom I used to envy?

Name the sum I would not have given to have been the bugle man who blew "Silver Moon" so gorgeously!

And then I passed from one sphere of Elysium to another when, after the circus, I went to the side-show and saw the fat woman, and the skeleton man, and the calf with three legs, and the dog with two heads, the man who swallowed the sword and the man who took the snake's head in his mouth. And I went home and dreamed that I was ring-master, gorgeous in silver lace, with a long whip which I snapped at the clown, and, rapture of raptures, did I not help the angels to mount their horses? Talk not of the realities of life by the side of that circus, which was an enchanted land!

As I look back to that circus, I see my first original sin or concatenation of sins.

Am I not he who informed my parents that I was going to see another little boy?

Am I not he who stole a watermelon from our neighbor's patch?

Am I not he who took it to old Bliffkins, who lived under the hill, and sold it to him for a shilling?

Am I not he who with the shilling walked two miles, and then found it cost a quarter to get into the circus? Was there ever such a monster as the man at the door, who wouldn't let me in?

I have never known such griefs as my grief that day. I hung round the outside of that tent as sinners are supposed to hang round the walls of Heaven. I heard the music and the hip-hips and the cheers and the snaps of the whips, and in my desperation I tried to look under the canvass, but was detected in the act by the monster at the door, and obliged to fly for my life. I have never known a grief so poignant as that.

I pity the man who has not sinned in his boyhood, all for a circus. He has missed one of the luxuries of life which can hardly find compensation in an æon of virtue.

June 15, 1867.

[BEFORE THE WEDDING.]

I HAVE already intimated in these columns that Aurelia is about to be married. Young Peplum, who is so well known as the gentlemanly clerk at ——'s dry goods store, and who is heir apparent to a snug hundred thousand, when his uncle dies, is the fortunate man who will have the pleasure of supplying her with millinery hereafter, and of being known as the husband of Mrs. Aurelia ——.

Aurelia, at present, is in a frightful crisis of dry goods, and is driving to the very verge of distraction a score of dress-makers, milliners and cloak-makers, who are sitting around the house like so many Patiences on monuments. Fractions of bridal dresses, traveling dresses, morning wrappers, cloaks, basques and basquines, immaculate and mysterious white garments with the most spirituel ruffles and frills foaming over them, cobwebby handkerchiefs and articles in the sanctum sanctorum of the toilet, the meaning of which I suspect but dare not mention—are all over the house from the garret to the cellarage; on chairs, on tables, on beds, on the piano, on lounges, on everything. I had rather undertake to walk through an acre of eggs, without breaking one of them, than to go through the house without setting my No. 11 boot heel into some frail gossamer of a dress, and rending its gauzy fabric and Aurelia's heart at the same time.

All the expectations, the hopes, the responsibilities, the aims and ambitions of Aurelia's life, if not of all human lives, now depend on the difference of shade in two ribbons or the relative reflections in two different silks, on both of which she has set her heart.

They are sweet pretty—but O dear!

She has wept bitter tears over the total depravity of a bias and the literally infernal unreliability of a sewing machine, which will skip stitches in crises of awful importance. Three long nights she lay awake, haunted with the dreadful suspicion that her shoemaker was an impostor, and that he had not given her the latest style of slipper-tie.

How could she assume the grave responsibilities of married life, if her slipper-tie were not the very latest?

Of course she couldn't.

She is thoroughly convinced that if anything should go wrong in the preparations for the ceremony, or in the ceremony itself, the world would cease its diurnal revolutions; there would be no further use for its axis; seed time and harvest would be alike immaterial to the farmer; ships and ledgers to the merchant; the anvil and loom to the mechanic; there would be nothing more worth living for; her career might as well be ended, the curtain come down, the lights go out, and the audience go home, without stopping for the close of the play.

I pitied the Dear Child, and so, yesterday, after she had consulted the marriage column of the Tribune, to see if any other person in the city had undergone her tribulations, I invited her to my den, that I might administer some consolation to her, wading in such deep waters. She gave the Patiences some parting injunctions, and each of them, from their respective monuments, looked down with weary eyes and nodded acquiescence.

She sat down by my Minerva, paying little heed, however, to those wise, solemn eyes which looked out from the marble with a sort of pity at her. I lighted my meerschaum, just commencing to be flecked with delicate amber streaks, and I said to her, as she listlessly pulled a bouquet to pieces, scattering the petals upon the floor, as if they were the ghosts of little dead hopes:

My Dear Aurelia, I need not tell you that you are about to enter upon a very important phase of your life, which hitherto has been of about as much importance as your canary's; that you are about to assume the responsibility of knowing a porter-house from a tenderloin, peas from beans, and the mysteries of soup and salad; that you are about entering the arcana of the washboard, the mangle, and the sideboard; and that you are to fit yourself for the companionship of the young ladies who will stand to you in the relation of domestics: for all of which you will find a recompense and sweet solace in your husband's pocket-book. In view of these solemn responsibilities of the present, and small anxieties which may accrue in the hereafter, it is eminently proper that you should approach the altar with a certain degree of reverence—

(At this point Minerva distinctly winked her left eye at Aurelia, but Aurelia did not notice it, whereupon the Goddess resumed her wise look, and I continued):

I am only afraid, my Dear Child, that in making all these preparations, you are rather making them for Mrs. Grundy than for yourself, against which mistake I would caution you for several reasons.

It is not probable that the great world will care much for your marriage.

(Aurelia astonished, and Minerva winking both eyes.)

I presume to say that horse races, billiard and base-ball matches will take place just as they always have; that Napoleon will quarrel with Bismarck after your marriage as he did before; that the Eastern Question will continue to trouble political philosophers, and that your neighbors will go on eating, drinking, driving, gossiping and pouring out the small beer of their lives much the same as they have always done, and that the world will continue to turn round, and that you and your husband and your rainbows, orange flowers, Cupids and moonbeams will go round with it, just as if you had never been married.

My Dear Child, this world is nothing but an ant-hill, and we are quite insignificant ants, each toiling along with his or her little burden, and when one ant gets another to help carry the load, the other ants don't mind it much, but push on with their burdens. Some day we go out of sight into the alluvium of the hill, burden and all, and forget to come out again, but even then, strange to say, the other ants don't miss us or stop to look after us, but keep pushing on, this way and that, and running over each other, and quarrelling about burdens. Therefore, my dear, I would advise you to let Mrs. Grundy carry her burden and pay no attention to her. Take your meals regularly and your usual allowance of sleep. It will be better for your peace and your digestion.

And again, my dear Aurelia, I am afraid you are going to make a splurge. A splurge is a good thing if you can keep splurging. If, when you set off like a rocket, you can keep going like a rocket, brilliant and beautiful, it will be a very good thing to do. But if you start like a rocket, and come down like a poor, miserable stick, with a wad of burned pasteboard on the end of you, you had better never have been touched off, because everybody will say they knew it would be so, and you yourself will sit in ashes all your life, clothing yourself with sackcloth, and lamenting your silliness in trying to make a splurge.

Now your future husband is making a comfortable living, and by the practice of ordinary economy you and he may get along very comfortably. In regard to your legacy there is no certainty. Your uncle's lungs and liver are much better than your husband's, and even if your husband should outlive him, there may be nothing left to give you, so that after spreading your choice dishes for your guests you may have to come down to potsherds yourself. Do not splurge, therefore, unless you are ready to keep up your splurge. Beware of going into the large end of the horn and coming out of the little end, for you will be very thin when you come out, and Mrs. Grundy will laugh at you. I think it is better, if there is any uncertainty about your prospects, to go in at the little end, and then when you come out at the large end, you can come out in style and with plenty of room. But, under any and all circumstances, splurging is dangerous, and in nine cases out of ten will land you, heels upwards, kicking at space. You, yourself, my dear, will remember that on one occasion, when you were a little late at church and had on that new hat, you tried to splurge up the aisle and sat down suddenly upon the floor, with the whole congregation looking at you. Just so will it be all through life. If you have a weak point about you—and, my Dear Child, you have many (here Minerva actually nodded assent)—a splurge will be sure to discover that point to the spectator. Therefore I would advise you and your husband to launch your craft very quietly. You will then have the right, when you can afford it, to do and be something in the world, and when your husband goes into the ant-hill out of sight, some other ant will tell in the papers, for the other ants to read, how he commenced poor but honest, and worked his way up, and some little ants with very large burdens will take courage thereat and ply their legs more vigorously than ever.

In another respect it is well not to make a splurge. If you make a public wedding and issue a large number of invitations, astonishing as the event may seem to you, it will be quite a common affair to most of us. The young people will criticise you most unmercifully. If there is an orange flower awry upon your veil, if there is a bit of ribbon or lace out of gear, if your hair is not exactly a la mode, they will find it out. Your looks and responses also, my dear, will be canvassed by charming young creatures, and as they weep such pearly tears of sorrow over your misfortunes, and are dying of envy that they haven't an opportunity of looking interesting, because they could do it so much prettier than you, they will mentally take a catalogue of all your adornments and discuss them for many days to come. The old married people who come, I assure you, will do the operation much as they do their dinners. Bless you, they have seen weddings before, many a time, and if they have one interested thought about this ceremony, which you suppose all the world is looking at, it is that they did this sort of thing better in their day. Then in your list of invitations, when you make it general, there will always be the old lady who goes to funerals and weddings because she likes to, and thinks it her duty. She is equally solemn on both occasions, refers frequently to this vale of tears, and can weep with a fluency only equalled by a water-spout. You will do well to keep on her good side, which you can do by feeding her well; for in spite of the fact which she so frequently announces, that this is a vale of tears, she can eat a square meal with a success only equalled by young Boosey, whom you will have to invite, and who will come only to gormandize on your cake and wine and grow eloquent over your Russe. It would be better for you, therefore, to avoid a large gathering, and still better to make your party a family one.

Again, I would urge upon you, my Dear Child, not to attempt to look interesting. By all means avoid this rock upon which young brides are apt to split. I have seen scores of brides go off the stocks and I have never seen one yet who tried to look interesting, who didn't resemble a wax figure in a hair store or a goose in a paddock. You had better look like yourself. Remember that you are a woman. Listen to the minister and answer his questions sensibly and not go off in a paroxysm of smiles, quirks, simpers and pianissimo lisping, as if you were the ghost of a rose leaf, which you are not, my dear.

Also, have a perfect understanding with your husband-to-be. You have been living on moonbeams long enough. Sink your romance sufficiently to get at realities, and it will save you heartburns, headaches and red eyes hereafter. Your husband, who has a stomach like other men, will get sick of living on moonshine in an incredibly short space of time. He accomplished the purpose of moonshine, my Dear Child, when he got you, and he will immediately return to the more substantial things of the earth. And you yourself will be astonished how quickly the realities of married life will take the romantic starch out of you, and at the suddenness with which you will tumble, (like the man who came down too soon to inquire the way to Norwich,) from your enchanted world to the commonplaces of beefsteak, baby-baskets and washboards. It will be best, therefore, for you to exactly understand each other, because one of you cannot live in the moon and the other on the earth.

Lastly. I would solemnly caution you against making the mistake that you are the only woman in the world who ever got married. My dear Aurelia, singular as it may seem to you, thousands and millions have been married before you, and thousands and millions will be married after you, and thousands and millions will care as little for your marriage as you do for your grandmother's. (Minerva at this point nodded assent so vigorously that she lost her balance and fell at the feet of my Venus di Medici, and was exceedingly shocked at the latter.)

I was about to conclude my morning talk with an impressive peroration on the duties, trials and pleasures of wedded life, and rose to relight my pipe, when I found that Aurelia was fast asleep.

I was saddened at the discovery, but I quietly slipped out and told the Patiences on the monuments of it, and they one and all rested, and this explains the reason why the work got behind-hand, and Aurelia had to postpone the wedding one day.

June 22, 1867.

[THE WEDDING.]

THE great event of the week has not been the Fourth of July, as is vulgarly supposed, but the marriage of Aurelia to young Peplum, the gentlemanly clerk at ——'s dry goods store, heir apparent to $100,000, etc.

I regret to say that Aurelia paid no regard to the advice I gave her two weeks ago. In spite of all my efforts to persuade her to the contrary, she persisted in the hallucination that she was the first woman who had ever been torn away from distracted parents and led, a garlanded victim, to the matrimonial altar. I think she was disappointed that the heavens were not hung with white favors, and that deputations were not present from the various races of the globe, and that business was not suspended. The number of invitations was only limited by the capacity of the house. Everyone of the young ladies invited was a very dear friend, not to have invited whom would have given mortal offence, and sundered friendships, in many cases of several weeks' existence, without which life would have been a blank—Sahara without an oasis—Heaven without a star.

M. Arsene Houssaye, rash man, says that woman is the fourth theologic virtue and the eighth mortal sin. Upon this standard it is safe to say there was present a frightful amount of theologic virtue and mortal sin. I am sure of the latter fact.

The hour for the ceremony had been appointed at 6 P.M. Deeply impressed as was Aurelia with the idea that Columbus, discovering the New World; Galileo, fixing the motion of the earth round the sun; Newton, discovering the laws of gravitation, and Harvey, finding the circulation of the blood—were but every-day common-places compared with this event,—she had, nevertheless, found it impossible to convince the Directors of the Michigan Central Railroad of that fact. The result was that trains ran at the usual hour, and would not wait, even one little minute, and it was vulgarly necessary, therefore, to have the wedding promptly at six.

After the wedding was over, I invited old Blobbs up to my den to smoke, and we compared notes on this occasion, and mutually arrived at this result: That the good old-fashioned custom of a large family wedding, celebrated in hospitable style, followed up with wit, sociality, games, and a dance, the guests departing at a seasonable time, well lined with capon and punch, trusting to Providence and instinct that the young couple would find their way through the night, somehow, to the breakfast table the next morning, the bride dressed in the rosiest of blushes, and the groom very plucky and defiant, each commencing the race in life from the starting point of home, was much more sensible than this modern custom of gathering together all their dear friends, hurrying through the ceremony, and then running off a thousand miles, as if the couple had done something they were ashamed of.

And then we compared the comfort of home with a sleeping car: your own snugly furnished and beautifully adorned room, cosy, quiet, dreamy and mysterious, with the vulgar, rattling, smoking, baby-crying, enjoyed-in-common, dirty-counterpaned, cindery, head-smashing, waked-up-every-hour bunks of the sleeping car; the breakfast of cream and honey and strawberries, fragrant Mocha and snowy rolls, with the dirt, dust, cinders, smoke, tough beefsteaks and mahogany coffee of a sleeping car.

"De gustibus non est disputandum," said I.

"Ditto," said Blobbs.

From early morn until dewy eve, the dressmakers, mantau-makers, milliners, hair-dressers and chambermaids had been laboring on Aurelia. They modelled her, shaped her, powdered her, painted her, twisted her, pulled her, laced her, unlaced her, fixed her, took her to pieces and put her together again, behind carefully locked doors, while that poor devil Peplum, in a seven-by-nine room, with a two-by-three looking glass, two brushes and a comb, went at himself with fear and trembling, and although he was more lavish than ever of Macassar and Day & Martin, and split three pairs of kids and looked very red in the face, still he looked like himself, which is more than I can say of Aurelia.

In the meantime the guests were assembled, one hundred of whom were young ladies and all dear friends, looking very much like pinks in a parterre; fifty young gentlemen who looked as if they had something on their minds and were suspicious of the integrity of their cravats—(I know of nothing more terrible than to be in the company of very dear friends when you have a suspicion of the integrity of your outer man); a handful of old people who resembled feathery dandelion-tufts in a field of red and white clover; and Rev. Fitz-Herbert Evelyn, the sweet young associate of old Dr. Homilectics, who does up the weddings, youthful funerals, evening meetings, and morning calls, is sound on lunch, convenient in doctrine, and orthodox in raiment. For a set sermon on the rationalistic errors in Transubstantiation, the old doctor can beat him out of sight, but he has given up weddings as he is no longer sweet, and has been known to have talked common sense on such occasions, which is as much out of place as honesty in a Legislature. Consequently, the young ladies prefer the sweet, young Fitz-Herbert, who would sleep uneasily should he find a rose leaf under him edge upward, who rushes through the ceremony daintily, with the tips of his fingers, and after having tied the young lambs together with a thread, cooly dares anybody to put them asunder.

When the bridal couple entered the room, they immediately became the foci of three hundred or more eyes. They had scarcely got into position, when one hundred noses were elevated just a trifle, from which I judged that Aurelia, although fearfully and wonderfully made, was not altogether a success to her dear young friends. One hundred upper lips curled up, and fifty elbows of dear friends nudged in concert the corsets of fifty other dear friends, at what I afterwards found to be a spot upon her veil, left by one of the bridesmaids who was addicted to chewing spruce gum.

Aurelia commenced to look interesting, and, to my horror, so did young Peplum, and they succeeded admirably in looking like a young man and a young woman detected in the act of stealing green apples from a corner grocery. Sweet Mr. Evelyn stepped up, and after running his hand through his raven hair and passing it over his marble brow once or twice, thereby setting off to more advantage that amethyst ring which Blanche Jessamine gave him at the last meeting of the Young Ladies' Aid Society, he commenced looking very saintly and talking very sweetly.

After the customary promises, Fitz-Herbert began a beautiful exordium, feelingly alluding to the journey of life; touching upon the launching of the craft; alluding to calm seas; solemnly describing the mutual partnership of joys and sorrows; mentioning cups of bliss, sprinkling roses and boldly deprecating thorns. And when he said, in a solemn but sweet tone of voice: "My dear young friends, you are about to enter upon a pathway," etc., all the dear friends were visibly affected. One hundred lace handkerchiefs went up to two hundred eyes. The old maid who goes to all the weddings and funerals for lachrymal purposes went off like a waterspout. As she afterwards told me it did her a power of good, and that she hadn't enjoyed the blessing of tears so much since Podgers died.

(Podgers was a distant relative of her's on her mother's side, and was so confused at the time of his decease, that he forgot to mention her in his will.)

Mrs. Carbuncle, the woman in red hair and blue Thibet, who went to see Booth in Othello, because she doted on the Irish drama, had her child with her, who had served his purpose thus far in supplying some of the rash young fellows present with significant jokes. The child, seeing all the rest of the company in a lachrymose state, also lifted up his voice and wept out of sympathy. Mrs. Carbuncle's efforts to quiet him only made matters worse, and the youthful Carbuncle, kicking and weeping, was carried off in disgrace to an upper chamber, where, for half an hour afterwards, he manifested his poignant grief, by refusing to be comforted, and bumping the back of his head against a cottage bedstead.

Sweet Fitz-Herbert, who has a gift at weddings, but a keen appreciation of fees, was very brief in his ceremony, much to young Boosey's delight, who was dying to get at the supper table, around which Biddy was hovering in transports of delight like a bee round a hollyhock, being engaged at the same time in an internecine war with some men and brethren who had invaded her domains, in which war she was assisted by all the Biddies of the neighborhood, whom she had smuggled in by the back entrance to see the tables.

The ceremony having been concluded, congratulations were in order, when Mrs. Flamingo burst in, in a state of perspiration and general deshabille. For being just two minutes late, and for sleeping over on important occasions, that woman is a prodigy. In the natural history of society, she is the Great American Snail. If she ever dies, she will have to change her present habits, and in any event will sleep over when Gabriel blows his trumpet. If she had lived in the days of Noah, she would have been drowned within hailing distance of the ark. She is the woman who always comes late at the concerts and has to be waked by the door-keeper when he puts out the lights, and is always vigorous in pursuit of the last car of a railroad train.

It is hardly necessary for me to describe the wedding supper: the cakes, crowned with sugar cherubs straddling white roses and chasing golden butterflies among silver leaves; sugar Cupids, hovering on the brink of an ocean of Charlotte Russe; the huge pyramid of small syllabubs, which a man and brother, losing his presence of mind in waiting upon young Boosey, upset in all directions; the saucer of ice cream which another man, etc., upset upon Mrs. Carbuncle's head; the Heidseck which ruined Celeste's silk; the customary sentiment of sweet Fitz-Herbert, which I give entire: "Our dear young friends, who this night enter the pathway of life: May their cup of bliss always be full and their journey strewn with roses without a thorn. And if we never meet here, may we meet hereafter where they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Greatest of all, need I describe how Boosey and the crying old maid commenced at one end of the table and ate and drank through to the other without a single skip, or how Boosey retired from the fray, confused in his mind and uncertain in his legs, after proposing as a sentiment: "Here's to Peplum and Mrs. Peplum—j-j-jolly good fe-fe-fe-fellows. Dr-dr-dr-drink hearty."

The most astonishing event of the evening was the utter indifference of the hackman, who took the bride and Mr. Peplum to the depot. He was not aware of the importance of the event, and even dared to growl up to the fifth trunk, and swear in a low tone of voice at the sixth and last—the four-story Saratoga, and in a satirical tone of voice asked if he should drive to the freight depot.

That wretched man knew not that he carried the first woman ever married.

The guests finally departed—Mr. and Mrs. Peplum to the uncertainties of the sleeping car; sweet Fitz-Herbert leaving a Night-Blooming Cereus odor of sanctity behind him; the dear young friends; the old dandelion tops; the old maid still weeping; the disgraced child; Boosey on his winding way; and Mrs. Flamingo, who was found asleep near the ruins of the supper table, when Biddy was putting out the lights.

And I went to my den and lit my pipe and looked out of the window. The moon was still shining. The stars winked at me. A romantic young man was practising "Oft in the Stilly Night" on a cracked trumpet. Terrence and Bridget were sitting up at the next gate. The wind blew. The leaves rustled. My pipe glowed. The world revolved. I existed. And yet Aurelia had been married that very night.

If I have said little about Mr. Peplum, it is because Mr. Peplum seemed to have very little to do with it.

July 6, 1867.

[MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY.]

ARE you a base-ballist? If not, take my word and retire from the world.

You are a nullity, a nothing, a 0.

The cholera of 1866 is among us, but it has assumed the base-ball type. It is malignant, zymotic and infectious. Its results are not so fatal as last year, and manifest themselves in the shape of disjointed fingers, lame legs, discolored noses, and walking sticks.

The disease is prevalent among all classes. Editors, actors, aldermen, clerks, lumbermen, commission men, butchers, book-sellers, doctors and undertakers have it, and many of them have it bad.

Even the tailors tried to make up a club, but as they found it took eighty-one men to make up a nine they gave it up.

The only class not yet represented is the clerical.

More's the pity.

They would derive many advantages from the game. You see they would learn the value of the short stop. That is an important point on warm Sundays. They would also learn to hit hard. There are lots of old sinners who need to be hit that way. This continual pelting away with little theological pop-guns at old sinners whose epidermis is as thick as an elephant's, is of no consequence whatever. The shot rattle off like hailstones from a roof. They must learn to hit hard—hit so it will hurt—hit right between the eyes—fetch their man down, and rather than take such another theological bombshell, he will reconstruct.

There isn't a minister in this city who wouldn't preach better next Sunday for a square game of base-ball. This Christianity of the soft, flaccid, womanish, alabaster, die-away muscle kind, is pretty, but it isn't worth a cent in a stand-up fight with the Devil.

The Devil is not only a hard hitter with the bat, but he is a quick fielder, and he will pick a soul right off the bat of one of these soft muscle men while S. M. is wasting his strength on the air. He has another advantage over our clergymen. Most of them are confined to one base. The Devil plays on all the bases at once, and he can take the hottest kind of a ball without winking. Our ministers ought to get so they can do the same thing.

Melancthon was one of the soft muscle kind. He was gentle, sweet, amiable, gracious, and all that, but if he had been compelled to carry the Reformation on his shoulders, he never would have left his home base. While old Luther, a man of iron muscle, a hard hitter and a hard talker, who keeled the Devil over with his inkstand, and kicked Popes and Popes' theses, bulls and fulmina to the winds, made home runs every time, and left a clean score for the Reformation.

A great many of our ministers have bones—some, rather dry bones—nerves, sinews and muscles, just as an infant has, but they want development. They need blood which goes bounding through the veins and arteries, and tingles to the finger tips. Their sinews must stiffen up, their nerves toughen and their muscles harden. This process can be obtained by base-ball. It will settle their stomachs and livers, and when these are settled, their brains will be clear. They won't have to travel to cure the bronchitis, and won't be so peevish over good sister Thompson, who needs a great deal of consolation, owing to her nervous system.

Now, I would like to see two ministerial nines in the field. Robert Collyer at the bat would be a splendid hitter, and would send the Liberal ball hot to Brother Hatfield, on the short stop, and I would stake all my money that he couldn't make it so hot that Brother H. wouldn't stop it. These two clergymen wouldn't need to practice much, because they represent my idea of muscular Christians. Whenever they hit, they hit hard, and I pity the soft-muscled parson that gets into a controversy with either of them. But then they would get all the rest of the nines into good trim and harden up the muscles of Dr. Ryder and Robert Laird Collier, Father Butler, Dr. Patton, and Revs. Everts and Patterson, and the rest. To be sure, the clerical fingers would sting, and the clerical legs would be stiff, and the clerical backs would ache for a few days, but it would take all the headaches and dizziness, and dyspepsia and liver complaints, and heartburns out of the system. Their inner men would be refreshed, and their outer men regenerated, and they would go into their pulpits with firmer step, and their sermons would be full of blood and muscle, and they would kick the old musty tomes on one side and preach right out of their consciousness and hearts, man to man, and all would get their salaries increased and a month's vacation to go to the seaside.

I tell you, my brethren, in this city of Chicago, the Devil is getting the upper hand, and you must go in on your muscle. Get your backs up. Stiffen your muscles and then hit like a sledge-hammer. If old Crœsus, in your congregation, is a whiskey-seller, don't be afraid of him. Hit him on the head so it will hurt. If Free-on-Board is a professional grain gambler, hit him on the head. If old Skinflint acts dirtily with his tenants, tell him he is a miserable old devil. Don't be afraid of him. He will like you all the better for it. If he won't get down on his knees by fair talking, take hold of his coat-collar and put him upon his knees.

August 17, 1869.

[THE BOSTON GIRL.]

THE Boston girl, necessarily, was born in Boston. Necessarily, also, her ancestors, and she can trace back her lineage to that Thankful Osgood, who came over in 1640, and owned the cow that laid out the streets of Boston. The wolf that suckled Romulus was held in no more respect by the Latins than is the bronzed image of that cow, cast by Mr. Ball, the sculptor, upon a commission from her father, a solid man, who lives on Beacon street, in a brown stone front with two "bow" windows and a brass knocker.

The ambition of every Boston girl is to live in a brown stone front with two "bow" windows and a brass knocker, before she dies. Having accomplished that, and attended a course of medical lectures, she is ready to depart in peace, for after that, all is vanity.

There are three episodes in the life of every Boston girl, viz., the Frog Pond, the Natural History Rooms, and the Fraternity Lectures. In her infancy, if so majestic a creature ever had an infancy, she sailed small boats on the Frog Pond, and was several times rescued from drowning in its depths, by the same policeman, who to-day wanders along its stone coping, watching the reflection of his star in the water, as he did a quarter of a century ago. She visits the pond daily on her way to the Natural History Rooms, where she inspects with diurnal increase of solicitude the bones of the megatherium and the nondescript fœti of human and animal births, preserved in Boston bottles, filled with Boston spirits.

But the series of Fraternity Lectures is the great fact of the Boston girl's life. She dotes on Phillips, idolizes Weiss' social problems, goes into a fine frenzy over Emerson's transcendentalism, and worships Gail Hamilton and her airy nothings.

The Boston girl is of medium height, with a pale, intellectual face, light hair, blue eyes, wears eye-glasses, squints a little, rather deshabille in dress, slight traces of ink on her second finger, blue as to her hose and large as to her feet. Of physical beauty she is no boaster, but of intellectual she is the paragon of animals. Gather a dandelion by the roadside, she will only recognize it as Leontodon taraxacum, and discourse to you learnedly of fructification by winged seeds. She will describe to you the relative voicings of the organs of Boston and the size of the stops in the Big one. She will analyze the difference in Beethoven's and Mendelssohn's treatment of an allegro con moto. She will learnedly point out to you the theological differences in the conservative and radical schools of Unitarianism, and she has her views on the rights of woman, including her sphere and mission. But I doubt whether the beauty of the flower, the essence of music, the sublimity of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, or the inspiration of theology, ever find their way into her science-laden skull, or whether her spectacled eyes ever see the way to the core of nature and art.

The Boston girl is a shell. She never ripens into a matured flesh and blood woman. She is cold, hard, dry and juiceless. Gail Hamilton is a type of the Boston girl at maturity. Abby Kelly Foster was a type of the Boston girl gone to seed. If Gail Hamilton lives as long as did Abby, she will carry a blue cotton umbrella, wear a Lowell calico, and make speeches on the wrongs of woman and the abuses of the Tyrant Man. If the Boston girl ever marries, she gives birth to a dictionary, or to a melancholy young intellect, who is fed exclusively on vegetables, at the age of six has mastered logarithms and zoology, is well up in the carboniferous and fossiliferous periods, falls into the Frog Pond a few times, dies when he is eight years of age, and sleeps beneath a learned epitaph and the Leontodon taraxacum.

September 7, 1867.

[THE DEAD.]

HAS a live man any rights which a dead man is bound to respect?

I ask this question with due consideration for the feelings of a dead man. I know it is an unpleasant thing to be a dead man. There are no corner-lots, no operas, no new novels, no latest styles, no duck-shooting, no sensations on the other bank of the Styx.

I never appreciated that poet who would not live always. I would.

Neither that other poet who wanted to die in the summer time. I am so little particular about the time, as to prefer not to die at any time.

Neither those gushing young women who pine for a willow tree, with a nightingale "into it," at the headboard, and trim daisies at the foot-board.

My sepulchro-botanical yearnings are overpowered by a very strong friendship for this superb old world.

Which reminds me to again ask the question: Has a live man any rights which a dead man is bound to respect?

And this suggests, first, Tombstones.

I am prepared to make a wager with any responsible party that in a match for the championship of lying, a tombstone would beat Ananias with Sapphira thrown in, and will give odds. Hic jacet is literally true, and about the only true thing the majority of tombstones say. If the ghosts of the late deceased—who are always eminent—are permitted to stroll about cemeteries at their leisure, their astonishment at reading their epitaphs must be of the most supernatural character.

A miser, whose small soul in his earthly life could not have been found with a microscope, is astonished to discover, that he was a liberal-hearted man and a benefactor, with distant allusions to the possibility of his having been an angel in disguise.

A man who went through the world without the responsibility of a single moral principle under his vest, suddenly finds that he was possessed of all the cardinal virtues, and is written down on cool marble as an exemplar for the rising generation.

A woman who, in the earthly tabernacle, was the lingual scourge of her neighborhood, discovers that she was the loveliest of her sex, and is now an angel with the handsomest wings to be found in the whole ornithological tribe of the upper air.

A man whose highest ambition was to go through life quietly, doing as much good as he could for his fellows, and to go out of life like a gentleman, finds himself kicking up posthumous dust under a huge monument of the most elaborate description, gaudy with gilding, wreaths, chaplets, urns, torches and flowers.

Considering the number of nuisances among the living, the quantity of angels and cherubs in every graveyard is appalling, and it becomes a question worthy of consideration by the Academy of Sciences—the ultimate destination of the sinners and poor devils. All known grave yards are devoted exclusively to saints. In what ignota terra rest the bones of the sinners?

Now, I submit that a live man has some rights which a tombstone is bound to respect, and that when old Sniffles, who swindled me unmercifully, the other day, without any compunction, shuffles off his miserable coil, his tombstone shall not tell me he was a pink of honesty.

And again, are we not overdoing the thing in regard to funerals? I have already shown in these letters that one can hardly afford to die now-a-days, owing to the expense. This expense grows out of the fact that we are letting fashion act as mistress of ceremonies on these occasions. It is not enough that fashion has made asses of us, and tricked us out with her fantastic nonsense all our lives, but, even after the curtain has fallen, the lights are turned off, the audience have gone home, and the house is shut up, fashion still persists in hanging its gewgaws upon the outside walls.

Accordingly, every respectable deceased must be buried in a casket—a pretty casket of the most approved shape, and the costlier the material, the better. The nails must be silver-headed to be au fait, and the handles classic in design and silver beyond suspicion. The inside must correspond with the outside, and, after the late deceased is laid out, it is then eminently proper to smother him or her with flowers, crosses, wreaths, anchors and other emblematic designs. The climax will be capped if the deceased is clad in the latest style of the beau monde, and carries with him or her into the long sleep, the exact cut or style of garment in which death overtook him or her.

I am not inveighing against respect to the dead. I believe that nothing is so appropriate for a dead child as flowers, nothing so typical of beauty and purity, nothing which so becomes the young life, frail as the flowers themselves. I only object to the frivolous, foolish, indecorous displays which fashion compels the survivors to make. If a man has lived through life like a gentleman, let him be buried like a gentleman, without fashion's tricking-out. I submit that when a man or woman has got through with life, he or she has got through with fashion, and that it is the height of folly for friends of the family to allow officious tradesmen the opportunity of displaying their fashionable wares, on an occasion when simplicity and solemnity are most befitting.

Which brings me to another point in considering whether a live man has any rights a dead man is bound to respect. And that point is—Mourning.

On general principles, I claim that we have no right to advertise our griefs to the world by mourning apparel. Of all griefs, those of death should be the most delicate, the most personal. If we must do it at all, I think the Chinese custom of wearing white is the most sensible. Why must we go in sables and obtrude our crape into the blessed light of the sun, and our black sorrow into the eyes of the world, when all is light where our friend has gone?

But this custom could be endured if fashion had not seized it. Fashion regulates our sorrow, measures our grief, and bounds our mourning within prescribed limits. Heartfelt grief goes in deep black. Good average grief in half black. Mitigated grief contents itself in a black-bordered handkerchief, and advertises itself to correspondents in a black-bordered envelope. Hopeful grief will get along with a jet pin, and for just the smallest amount of grief in the world, a dark figure in the dress, and a week's abstinence from the opera will do; while for the tribe of relatives whom you never saw and never wanted to see, any milliner or tailor can regulate your grief with a yardstick or hat-body.

If I were a blessed, viewless spirit, and found a friend of mine indulging in mitigated grief for me with handkerchief edging, I would indulge in spiritual manifestations which would put the Fox sisters to their trumps.

In the name of our common humanity, do we not play pranks enough with the living to let the dead rest? Why vex their memories with the foolery of fashion? Why make ourselves walking sign-boards, announcing to the world, that does not care a whit about it, that we are in this or that stage of grief?

With our fashionable mourning, we are putting a libel on immortality, and lowering to the vulgar level of common notoriety what should be most sacred and strictly private.

And now I suppose that, in answer to all this, somebody will fling at me that stupid old apothegm—De mortuis nil nisi bonum. It is time that maxim was exploded, or, at least, dissected, so that it may have proper application. A, who has been a rascal all his life, dies, and immediately we are all so tender of his reputation that we very nearly canonize him. As soon as a man dies, it is the universal outcry to let him rest. I do not see the slightest danger of disturbing his rest by anything we can say or do. He will probably lie quite as still as if we are silent. It is not probable that he will grow indignant if we tell the exact truth about him, or exhibit any large amount of gratification over our eulogies. In this upper world it is quite a common thing for us to assail our dear friends as soon as their coat-tails are over our thresholds, when this backbiting may be cruelly unjust, and there are some of us who require a very light stock of material to do a thriving business in slander. We pursue our friends with defamation while living, and while it will injure them, but when dead and past all injury, we grow suddenly reticent and commence the rather ungracious task of eulogy, and we usually outdo ourselves in the latter direction. Let equal justice be done. Hold up the dead man's virtues to emulation, and his vices to abhorrence. He is quite beyond any harm we can do him, and if we have any tenderness to bestow on reputation, let us bestow it on the living.

October 26, 1867.

[OUR THANKSGIVING.]

WE had just got up from dinner table on Thanksgiving Day and retired to the parlor to chat—Celeste and Boosey, Aurelia and her husband and infant, Mignon and Blanche, Old Blobbs and Mrs. Blobbs and myself.

We were all very thankful, although in divers ways. Boosey was thankful that he had had enough to eat, and that Celeste had got out of the Sorosis; while Celeste was thankful that Boosey had got through the dinner safely and soberly, and had brought her home a new hat the night before. Aurelia and Mr. Peplum were thankful for a small stranger, who dropped in upon them a few weeks since, spoken of above as the infant, and commonly reputed in our set to be the handsomest and smartest baby that has had the bad luck to be born into this world of fleeting show. Mignon was thankful that in these silent days of the year, there is so much beauty left, and Blanche was as thankful as a bobolink on a spray for all good things. Old Blobbs was thankful Mrs. Blobbs had omitted her customary morning lecture, and Mrs. Blobbs was thankful that Old Blobbs had managed to get through his dinner without saying any disagreeable things.

As for myself, I was thankful that I was not obliged to be thankful again for a year. It is hard upon a man to be thankful on the basis of turkey in various culinary stages. I have not the slightest doubt one can be thankful to Divine Providence, Who has vouchsafed, etc., from the depths of his stomach, and can measure his gratitude by the pile of bones on his platter, but it involves dyspeptic possibilities which are fearful to contemplate, and in point of thankfulness leaves a man nowhere in comparison with a hog.

I must acknowledge, further, that it is difficult for me to see the connection between bountiful harvests, and let us have peace, and the mastication of turkey. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace after a Thanksgiving dinner. One might eat a bald eagle and grow patriotic, or a goose and obtain wisdom; but why the turkey should be singled out as the emblem of gratitude, and why we should be called upon to express that gratitude by filling ourselves to the brim with the self-conceited coxcomb of the barn-yard, passes my comprehension. It seems to me that we mistake gluttony for gratitude, and that in the immensity of our gratitude we are killing off turkeys at a rate which must be highly unsatisfactory to the gobblers, who are most interested in the matter. If we are to be thankful by wholesale in this manner on Thanksgiving, why not carry the same principle into our retail gratitude? For instance, if Potter Palmer should come to me and say: "My dear boy, I have no further use for that shanty on the corner of State and Washington streets; take it," I might go at once and eat an oyster stew as a token of my gratitude, and if he should throw in that man and a brother with the horizontal coat-tails, I might go one better also, and eat half a dozen raw. When Blanche sends Mignon a little token of love and esteem, Mignon might eat a Charlotte Russe as a proof of her gratitude, and range from a Russe up to a moderate lunch, according to the value of the gift. Gifts of pocket-handkerchiefs could be paid for by eating a pickle, embroideries in Berlin wool might range as high as a chicken wing, a volume of Tupper be atoned for by a boiled onion; while, to express my thanks for a corner lot with a full furnished house on it, I would risk a moderately-filled dish of pork and cabbage.

I haven't much confidence in that gratitude which strikes to a man's stomach, or that sense of thankfulness which can only be expressed via the stomach.

This was not what we talked about when we got into the parlor, but we undoubtedly should have discussed this topic had not Old Blobbs suddenly broken out on his favorite theory that the world was wrong side up. He does not believe in the present arrangement of things at all, and I sometimes think he is more than half right. Aurelia, Mr. Peplum and the little one were in a corner together, making a very cozy-looking trio; Celeste and Boosey were just about to commence a game of backgammon; Blanche was at the piano, listlessly running her white fingers over the keys, as if she were trying to recall some old melody which had been lost among them in departed days; Mignon sat in the window just under the parlor ivy, which seemed to be trying to reach down to her with its graceful curves as to something akin to it in grace and beauty, when Old Blobbs suddenly broke out: "If I had the management of this world, things would change places. Nothing is in its right place."

"And how would you change them, my dear Blobbs?" said I.

"Change them!" said he. "If I could arrange men and things as they ought to be, you would see some very poor men living in very handsome houses, and some very rich men uncertain where they would get their next meal. You would see some parishioners in the pulpit and some preachers in the pews. You would see some car horses on the front platform and some drivers harnessed to the pole. You would see some men running down the street with tin kettles tied to their tails, and some dogs looking on approvingly. You would see my Lady So-and-So, who can go to the opera every night quite brave in her laces, and diamonds, and head-gear, with no more comprehension of, or care for, what is going on than a cow has of true and undefiled religion, change place with some poor soul to whom music comes full of consolation, and rest, and sympathy, and who cannot go at all. Yes, sir," said Old Blobbs, reddening with rage, "the whole world is wrong, all wrong. Incompetence stands in the shoes of competence. The weak go to the wall. Dishonesty comes out ahead. Brass passes for gold, and tin for silver. One paltry dollar will go further and make more knees bend than all the concentrated honesty and decency of the world since Adam delved and Eve spun. Vive la humbug! The kettles and pots go swimming down the stream because they are empty. A piece of pure, solid metal, no matter how small, goes to the bottom."

"But," said I, "the world keeps turning round, and some day the right must come uppermost."

Blobbs admitted that, but added: "What is the use of a man's coming uppermost a century or two after he is dead, when there is nothing left of him but a bone here and there, and, perhaps, nothing but a handful of dirt, to enjoy the sensation? Why not have the world so arranged that a decent man may, now and then, see some inducement to continue decent, and that real merit may find its recompense without being obliged to attain it through quackery, or enjoy it as a blessed ghost, two or three hundred years from now?"

And all the time Blobbs was delivering his little speech, Blanche was still hunting for the lost melody on the keys, and the ivy was still trying to put its pretty green arms around Mignon's neck, and Celeste was throwing double-sixes with Boosey, and Aurelia was playing with that wonderful baby.

November 28, 1868.

[MRS. GRUNDY.]