Phemie Frost's Experiences Part 4

Some useful things can be found in a great city like this. Now, I tell you, amongst them is a great, fat dictionary, crowded full of names, where everybody that keeps a decent house sets down the number, which is a convenience for strangers like me.

I found the name of Cousin Elizabeth's husband, who keeps a bank somewhere down town, the book said, and got into the first street car that went towards the Central Park. After a while I got out and hunted up the number, feeling awfully anxious, for the houses about there were what the papers call palatial--a word we have not much use for in our parts. I just stopped on the other side of the street and took a general survey before I attempted to go in, feeling more and more fidgety every minute, for that house just took me down with its sumptuousness. Such great windows, with one monstrous pane in a sash, and lace and silk and ta.s.sels shining through! The front was four stories high and ended off with the steepest roof you ever saw, just sloping back a trifle, and flattening off at the top, with windows in it, and all sorts of colors in the shingles, which they call "tiles" here. Then the stone steps wound up to a platform with a heavy stone railing on each side, and a great shiny door, sunk deep into the wall, was wide open, and beyond it was one of gla.s.s, frosted over like our windows on a snapping cold morning, and under my feet was a checkered marble floor. I found the k.n.o.b of a bell sunk into the door jamb, and pulled it a little, feeling half-scared to death. Then I just stepped in and waited in front of the gla.s.s door.

A colored person of remarkably genteel appearance opened the door, and gave me a look from head to foot that riled the old Adam in my bosom; then he muttered something about the bas.e.m.e.nt; but I put him down with just that one lift of my finger.

"Is my cousin, Mrs. Dempster, at home?" says I.

"I--I'll inquire," says he, as meek as Moses; "walk in."

Walk in I did.

"Have you a card?" says he.

"No," says I; "as a general thing cards ain't desirable among relations, nor moral under any circ.u.mstances with religious friends. Say that Miss Frost is here--Miss Phmie Frost, from the State of Vermont. No cards!"

The fellow opened a door on one side of the hall, and I went through.

Don't expect me to describe that room. It isn't in me to give the least idea of it. Great chunks of gla.s.s like the hub of a wheel, with crooked spokes of gla.s.s starting every way from it, and what seemed like hundreds of icicles falling from them, dropped down from the ceiling.

When the negro opened the blinds and let in a drift of sunshine, they turned into a snarl of rainbows that fairly blinded me. Then there was a carpet soft as spring gra.s.s in a meadow, and bright as a flower-garden; chairs shining with gold and silk; marble women, white as milk, with not a thing on worth speaking of, and looking-gla.s.ses half as large as our spring ponds.

I turned my looks away from the women without clothes, while that colored person was by; but gave them a skimpy peep or two the minute he was gone. Really, it was dreadful. I would not have believed such things of Cousin Elizabeth.

Oh mercy on me! while I was looking, in came a gentleman, who bowed, and took a chair, and sat smiling on those creatures just as if he was used to it. Talk of blushing--my face was one blaze of fire.

While I was wondering what I should do, a girl, or what ought to have been a little girl, came sidling into the room, gave me a look as if I'd been a dog in the wrong place, and went up to the gentleman.

"Mamma will be down directly, and has sent me to entertain you," says she, shaking out her short skirts, and almost sitting down on the crimpy hair that half covered them behind. "Ah! I see you are admiring our crouching Venus. Lovely, isn't it? The curving lines are so perfect.

The limbs--have you observed the foreshortening of that limb?"

The foreshortening of that limb? Mercy on me, I couldn't stand it.

Another minute and I should have boxed her ears, for all the blood that burned in my face went tingling down to my fingers. That was too much; so I up and said I would call again, and marched right out of the house.

Girls indeed!

III.

ABOUT GIRLS.

Dear Sisters:--You ask a puzzling and painful question--What kind of girls do the children I write about make?

My dear friends, girls--modest, rosy, bright-eyed school-girls, such as you are a-thinking of--are scarce as hen's teeth in this great city, and not to be found in profuseness anywhere. They went out with pink calico sun-bonnets, and ain't likely to come in again yet awhile, I tell you!

Republican inst.i.tutions can be carried to a great extent; and our young ones have found it out, and trample down all the good, wholesome old fashions before their little feet quite get out of baby shoes. At this moment I can't find a girl of twelve years old that don't know a thousand times more than her mother, and wouldn't attempt to teach law to her father if he was a judge in the Supreme Court. Yet, it's a shocking truth, the little upstarts don't know how to read like Christians, or spell half their words. The tip-top fashionable school-marms here are quite above teaching such common things as reading and spelling, and turn up their noses at any study that hasn't some "ology" or "phy" at the end of it.

I should just like to have a string of the girls that walk in squads up and down the Fifth Avenue, with short dresses and hair streaming loose down their backs, in a district school-house, with no books but Webster's Spelling-book and the Columbian Reader. Wouldn't I astonish them with science? I guess they would understand the meaning of a spelling-cla.s.s by the time I got through with 'em!

As for arithmetic, they don't know what it is in these high-falutin seminaries; mathematics is the word; A B roots and squaring circles, as if circles ever would be square. Of course they can't, having been tried and kept round as an O all the time. But these A's and B's, and roots and such like, are considered as arithmetic for girls here; so the end of it is, they can, maybe, tell you how many square feet there are in a building lot, but couldn't add up ten shillings to save their lives; of course they forget how to estimate the square feet for want of having unlimited building lots to work on, while the washing bill and girl's wages and such things, come up every day all through their lives.

What _do_ girls learn at the schools?

Oh, a mighty deal that some good women pa.s.s half through a lifetime without knowing, and are just as likely as not all the better for it.

Some of the lessons are paid for, and some are given free gratis for nothing by the scholars to each other, and what some of them don't know in the way of flirting, drooping the eyes, and things you never dreamed of, ain't worth keeping secret.

"A little leaven leavens the whole lump." That pa.s.sage has always relieved my feelings about the old patriarchs; for it's a proof that they and their families had raised bread in those old Bible times; and light bread, even if saleratus has to be used, is a blessing on the domestic hearth. For that reason, I'm astonished that bread-making is left to men-bakers here in York. But this pa.s.sage sometimes puts you in mind of something beside turnpike emptins. I should like to promulgate some genuine old-fashioned ideas into these tip-top schools, where one bold, forward girl with unwholesome ideas in her head, would set them working like leaven in every innocent young soul in the seminary.

Somehow, more or less, girls always do manage to give a good deal of knowledge that isn't set down in the bill, though that is generally long enough, goodness knows.

I wish you could see one of these bills with the extras. Now in our district schools, there isn't much chance for the scholars to get over intimate. They don't sleep and eat and work together, like canary birds crowded in one cage and huddled together on one roost; the weak don't catch the faults of the strong, and if they did, the free breezes of our hills would sweep them away before the poison struck in. Flirtations do not become a science with them before they can spell "baker," and they don't often learn such things from their New England mothers, anyhow.

Well, I would give a good deal to see a genuine girl who did not think herself a marvel of superior knowledge at twelve, or had not plunged into a heart disease at the sight of some hotel lounger at fourteen. I tell you, sisters, these young creatures have too much liberty; they have no wholesome growth either of body or mind. They know too much at fifteen, and will know a great deal too little at forty.

The girl of twelve--which is about the age you are thinking of--has a great deal more a.s.surance than some of our church members at fifty. Baby boys and girls haven't gone quite out of fashion, but they are getting scarcer every year, people tell me; and regular-built, wholesome children are as hard to find here as green gooseberries in October. I've seen plenty of little men and women, that couldn't speak plain to save their lives, dressed out like soldiers on a training day, with short frocks or tunics, and legs as bare as bare could be; but such boys and girls as we remember are not to be found anywhere nowadays, I tell you.

What does all this mean? Just this: Mothers don't trust their young ones out of fashion long enough to grow. Besides, there isn't, only now and then, one who gets acquainted with her own child well enough to know what is good for it. Why, these city women would go crazy to see a little girl, six years old, swing upon a gate or riding horseback on a rusty old farm-horse, gripping the mane with both hands, and sending up shouts of fun if she happened to tumble off. Children, in the natural state, love water, like ducks and goslings. It used to be a sight to watch them, knee-deep in the brooks, with their tenty-tointy feet shining through the ripples, as they hunted for water-cresses and sweet flag-root; but catch one of your new-fangled young ones at anything with so much human nature in it. All the water they see is in the bottom of a bath-tub, rubbed on their skimpy limbs by an Irish girl's hands. Not the mother's. Oh, no! Care of one's own children is too much for a healthy young woman nowadays. Being a professor and member of a church, I want to speak accordingly, and just drop the mothers here. Christian language isn't up to the occasion.

Well, as I was saying, the meanness of these mothers in hiving up their young ones and cheating 'em out of the very best years of life, is enough to make a saint mad. The rough-and-tumble season, which gives a child sound lungs, strong limbs, and a brain that thinks of nothing but high play, is just knocked out of their lives. It's an awful swindle on the poor little things, and I'm not afraid to say it openly and above-board here in my very first report.

If I haven't a right to speak on this subject, I should like to know who has. That's all. I never had a child of my own, which is, perhaps, natural to a state of single blessedness, and so had plenty of time to make other people's children a speciality. Besides, haven't I kept district school, and boarded round enough to get an inside view of a good many family circles? Haven't I seen droves of young ones, in loose calico slips or cosey-fitting jackets and trousers, coming miles to school, only setting their dinner baskets down now and then to stone a squirrel, or climb up among the burrs of some great chestnut limb which offered to give them a ride to Boston or a trip to Canterbury.

Dear me, I think I see them now running "like split," as they said, to catch up time, with such a lively color rushing through the tan on their faces, hats off, and sun-bonnets flying out by the strings.

There, that's what I call childhood. You and I, sister, know something about it; now don't we? Do you remember that little red school-house where we learned our letters, and the old broken-limbed apple-tree behind it? No wonder the limbs got scraggly; they couldn't stand horse for a whole school, year after year, without some wear and tear, could they?

Well, may be you and I owe to that old patriarch more than we know of.

The apples were so sour the pigs wouldn't eat 'em, but they never hurt us. Then the limbs stretching out every which way--weren't they splendid to swing on, and in a hot day the shade was like a tent.

You and I have been tough and hearty all our lives, just as like as not on account of that old tree and the long road home, and the pine woods it ran through, with the good wholesome samp and milk when we got there.

There was generally a little red light in the sky from the sunset when we went to bed, and just a streak of rosy yellow when we got up, with dew enough on the gra.s.s to wash our faces in before breakfast.

That's what I call life for a child; all out-doors for a playground, good, sound sleep, plenty of wholesome food, three times a day, and always hungry at that. Why, the few years after you begin to toddle, and before you learn to read, if you're properly let alone, are choke-full of happiness that ripples like a brook through your whole life. I say, once more, it's a sin and a shame to cheat a child out of that which is just G.o.d's portion of a human life.

Now I ask you, isn't it probable, between you and I, that the Saviour picked out just such bright, happy little creatures as these, when He took 'em in His arms and blessed 'em, and said of such is the kingdom of heaven. If the apostles wanted to hunt up one of the kind now, they'd have to catch it in the cradle. Just think of bringing forward one of the little things we meet in the avenues here, to be held up as a monument--all flutings and lace, kid gaiters, pink and blue sashes, long white feathers, and parasols. Yes, believe it or not, I say parasols about the size of a poppy. Oh, don't mention it! The whole thing makes me sick. The children you meet here in York look like little barefooted scarecrows, or else like motto papers afloat.

But are all the little folks you see painted like a dahlia, and pink as hollyhocks. You are asking this question in the Society. I know it.

Well, I should rather think not. These whipper-snappers go tipping down the avenues, and ride with their mothers' lap-dogs in the Park, a-looking like their own French dolls, and are about as likely to make men and women.

IV.

MORE ABOUT GIRLS.

Sisters:--My cousin's little girl has just upset me. Remember she is my own flesh and blood; and genuine honest blood in Vermont is as pure as the sap in our maple-trees, and ought to keep sweet as the sugar we make from it, wherever it is found. Being my second cousin in her own right, I expected to find her a model of what the rising generation ought to be, and went to that house, exalting myself accordingly. I shall find, thought I, a genteel, modest, seemly little lady, polite, and cordially glad to see a relative that wants to love her and exalt her into a pattern and a monument of female promise. But instead of that, just read my last report, though it must fall short of giving you any idea how heavy my heart was, and how my brain burned with disappointment.

_Has_ female modesty died out since you and I came into the world? or was it burnt over during the war, like the great prairies, where the hot flames parch up all the sweet green gra.s.s and the bright flowers, killing them root and blossom, snakes likewise? One thing is certain, my dear sisters in the cause, honesty among men and modesty among women go hand in hand all over the earth. When women degenerate, it is because the moral atmosphere which they breathe is tainted and unwholesome.

Something has gone awfully wrong both with the men and women of America in these latter years. The fraud and demoralization of the thing they call "shoddy" has settled down upon our social life everywhere. I shudder to think of it! With a const.i.tution made strong with fresh air from the Green Mountains, and morals consolidated in the oldest congregation of the State, I feel afraid of myself and almost weary of well-doing. It has become so miserably unfashionable to be honest, that people seem to think me crazy when I speak my mind.