THE DELIGHTS OF VISITING.
What is it to go away on a visit? Well, it is to take leave of the little velvet rocking-chair, which adjusts itself so nicely to your shoulders and spinal column; to cram, jam, squeeze, and otherwise compress your personal effects into an infinitessimal compass; to be shook, jolted, and tossed, by turns, in carriage, railroad and steamboat; to be deafened with the stentorian lungs of cab-drivers, draymen and porters; to clutch your baggage as if every face you saw was a highwayman; (or to find yourself transported with rage, at finding it transported by steam to Greenland or Cape Horn.) It is to reach your friend’s house, travel-stained, cold and weary, with an unbecoming crook in your bonnet; to be utterly unable to get the frost out of your tongue, or “the beam into your eye,” and to have the felicity of hearing some strange guest remark to your friend, as you say an early good-night, “Is it possible that is your friend, Miss Grey?”
It is to be ushered into the “best chamber,” (always a north one) of a cold January night; to unhook your dress with stiffened digits; to find every thing in your trunk but your night-cap; to creep between polished linen sheets, on a congealed mattress, and listen to the chattering of your own teeth until daylight.
It is to talk at a mark twelve hours on the stretch; to eat and drink all sorts of things which disagree with you; to get up sham fits of enthusiasm at trifles; to learn to yawn circumspectly behind your finger-tips; to avoid all allusion to topics unsuited to your pro tem. latitude; to have somebody forever at your nervous elbow, trying to make you “enjoy yourself;” to laugh when you want to cry; to be loquacious when you had rather be taciturn; to have mind and body in unyielding harness, for lingering, consecutive weeks; and then to invite your friends, with a hypocritical smile, to play the same farce over with you, “whenever business or pleasure calls them” to Frog town!