Lastly, the reason I can't lecture is because I am the wife of a lecturer. He likes it; but two of that trade in one family is more than human nature can stagger under. It is enough for me to see him come home white about the gills, with a muddy valise, and a mousey horror of a travelling blanket, that I always air the first thing, and with an insane desire to indulge in a Rip Van Winkle nap, and dodge his kind. Now I hope, in conclusion, it is sufficiently clear to you that I have no call on the platform. My "sphere is home." I trust Dr. Holland will make a note of this. "My sphere is home," especially when I'm asked to do anything outside of it that I don't want to do!
IN THE CARS.
"Palace cars" are a great invention for mothers with uneasy babies, for invalids, and for lovers. But as I am in neither of the above positions, allow me to express a preference for a seat in the common car. If I am to eat in public out of my luncheon basket, I prefer a large audience, with their backs to me, to a small one employed in looking down my throat. Then if I wish to go to sleep, again the audience have their backs to me. Or if I wish to read, they are not holding a coroner's inquest on my politics, or my literary taste in books. Then, again, although I want to pass unnoticed, yet with the lovely consistency of human nature generally, I like to observe life around me, and have enough of it to observe, too.
One result of my observations in this line has been the necessity of supporting a travelling missionary, to take from the necks of little children, in a hot car, the woollen mufflers that are turning their faces brick red, and the woollen mittens that are driving them wild, while their fond parents are absorbed in looking at illustrated papers, to get a snatched free reading before the carrier returns for the same. It is very funny how they will let these children wriggle and twist and turn, like little worms, and never think that anything can be the matter, save a lack of peanuts or painted lozenges, which they procure with a fiendish haste, and bestow with a profusion astounding to gods and some women. Presently the little victims call for "a drink of water," as well they may, with their feverish throats and mouths; but that only makes matters worse; so, by way of assuagement, a wedge of mince-pie is added, or a huge doughnut, supplemented by parched corn.
"Ye gods!" I mentally exclaim; and yet we keep on sending "missionaries to the heathen." I am not there at the journey's end to see how those children's ears are boxed for growing devilish on such fare, but I know it is done all the same by these ignorant parents. It is refreshing occasionally to hear a father or mother say to a child, "If you are hungry, you can eat this nice piece of bread and butter, or this bit of chicken, but you must not eat nuts, candy, pastry, and cake, when you are travelling." It is refreshing to hear one say, "Eat slowly, dear." It is refreshing to see one take off a child's hat or cap, and lay the little owner comfortably down for the little nap, instead of letting the child bob its tired, heated head vainly in every direction for rest. Now papa understands well enough in his own case what to do, in the way of alleviation; but children are bundled up like so many packages, on starting—labelled, ticketed—and, like these packages, not to be untied through any diversities of temperature till the bumping journey's end. It is monstrous! I am glad they kick all night after it—if so be their parents sleep with them!
But isn't it great, when, in addition to all these inflictions, a book-vender comes round and tries to make you buy one of your own books? That is the last ounce on the camel's back! How all its shortcomings and crudenesses come up before you! How all its "Errata!" How short you cut that wretched boy in his parrot panegyric! How you perspire with disgust till he takes it out of your sight and hearing, and how you pray "just Heaven" to forgive you for your sins of commission, all for bread and butter.
Now—as the story writers say when they drag in a moral by the head and shoulders, at the end of their narratives—"my object is accomplished, if the perusal of this, etc., shall have induced but one reader to reform, and lead a different life!"