CHAPTER XLIII.
MAKING THE BEST OF IT.
“O, blest with temper whose unclouded ray
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day!”—Pope.
A sound of the prompter’s whistle, sharp and stridulous.
The scenes move,—they dispart. The Crescent City, with its squares and gardens filled with verdure, its stately steeples, and its streets lying lower than the river, and protected only by the great Levee from being converted into a bed for fishes,—the Crescent City, under the swift touch of our fairy scene-shifters, divides, slides, and disappears.
A new scene simultaneously takes its place. It represents a street in New York. Not one of the clean, broad, well-kept avenues, lined on either side with mansions, beautiful and spacious. It is a trans-Bowery Street, narrow and noisome, dirty and dismal. There the market-man stops his cart and haggles for the price of a cabbage with the care-worn housewife, who has a baby in her arms and a two-year-old child tugging at her gown. Poor woman! She tries to cover her bosom as the wayfarer, redolent of bad tobacco, passes by with a grin at her shyness. There the milkman rouses you at daylight by his fiendish yell, nuisance not yet abated in the more barbarous parts of the city. There the soap-man and the fish-man and the rag-man stop their carts, presenting in their visits the chief incidents that vary the monotony of life in Lavinia Street, if we except an occasional dog-fight.
One of the tenements is a small, two-story brick house, with a basement beneath the street-level, and a dormer window in the attic. A family moved in only the day before yesterday. They have hardly yet got settled. Nevertheless, let us avail ourselves of the author’s privilege (universal “dead-head” that he is!) and enter.
We stand in a little hall, the customary flight of stairs being in front, while a door leads into the front sitting-room or parlor on the left. Entering this room, the first figure we notice is an apparently young man, rather stout, with black whiskers and hair, and dressed in a loose sack and pantaloons, in the size and cut of which the liberal fashion of the day is somewhat exaggerated. He stands in low-cut shoes and flesh-colored silk stockings. About his neck he wears a choker of the most advanced style, and tied with a narrow lustring ribbon, gay with red and purple. As his back is partly turned to us, we cannot yet see who he is.
A woman, in age perhaps not far from fifty, with a pleasant, well-rounded face, and attired in a white cambric wrapper, richly embroidered, her hair prudently hidden under a brown chenille net, stands holding a framed picture, waiting for it to be hung. It is Marshall’s new engraving of Washington. The lady is Mrs. Pompilard, born Aylesford; and the youth on the chair is her husband, the old, yet vernal, the venerable yet blooming, Albert himself. It is more than ten years since he celebrated his seventieth birthday.
Having hung the picture, Pompilard stepped down, and said: “There! Show me the place in the whole city where that picture would show to more advantage than just there in that one spot. The color of the wall, the light from the window are just what they ought to be to bring out all the beauties. Let us not envy Belmont and Roberts and Stewart and Aspinwall their picture-galleries,—let us be guilty of no such folly, Mrs. Pompilard,—while we can show an effect like that!”