LXXVIII.
THAT HAIR-TRUNK.
DEAR SISTERS:—We are here at Long Branch, bag and baggage—Cousin Dempster, E. E., myself, and that creature Cecilia, who is more trouble than the whole of us put together. We came down in—not on—the Plymouth Rock, which is nothing of the sort, but a steamboat, as long as all out-doors, with room enough for a camping-ground for the next generation on the decks, and rows of staterooms that would line the main street of Sprucehill on both sides, and have some to let. There was a whole lot of fiddlers and horn-players on board that began to play the minute we came in sight—a compliment that I should feel more deeply if it hadn't become so common; but somehow wherever I go, those musical fellows start up, and grind and blow till one almost begins to wish for the privacy of an obscure position.
Fame is beautiful, and reputation is the glory of genius; but when they are sounded out by fiddles in broad daylight, and blasted over creation by wide-mouthed toot-horns, innate modesty shrinks within itself.
I really felt this way when a squad of music-grinders burst out in high jubilee the moment my foot touched the deck. It was a compliment, of course, but the sun was pouring down upon us, hot as a fiery furnace.
The express-men were smashing our twenty-two trunks on deck end foremost, caving one in every minute or two, and I felt too hot and anxious for reciprocity when the musicians struck up, for all the genius and ambition was just burned out of me.
When we got aboard, the thermometer was running up so fast that another hitch would have made it boil right over. Those glass things ought to be made longer at both ends.
I haven't a blinding faith in express-men since I saw three of E. E.'s best Saratoga trunks stove in, so I let the music storm on while I kept watch of my own hair-trunk, which came down from my grandmother on the father's side, who fed the calf that gave up the skin that covers that trunk only with its innocent life. She fed it with skim-milk from her own saucer, and set store by the trunk on that account up to the day of her death. Then she willed it to me in a codicil, that being more sacred than the original testament, she said, which I cannot understand—all testaments, old or new, being first in my estimation.
Well, of course, I kept watch of that trunk, and when I saw a great broad footed Irishman take it from the wagon and pitch it ten feet on deck, I just shut my parasol, clenched it in the middle, and went up to him.
"How dare you pitch my property on end in that way?" says I.