A FERN REVERIE.
Dear me, I must go shopping. Shopping is a nuisance: clerks are impertinent: feminity is victimized. Miserable day, too: mud plastered an inch thick on the side walk. Well, if we drop our skirts, gentlemen cry “Ugh!” and if we lift them from the mud, they level their eye-glasses at our ankles. The true definition of a gentleman (not found in incomplete Webster) is—a biped, who, of a muddy day, is perfectly oblivious of anything but the shop signs.
Vive la France! Ingenious Parisians, send us over your clever invention—a chain suspended from the girdle, at the end of which is a gold hand to clasp up the superfluous length of our promenading robes; thus releasing our human digits, and leaving them at liberty to wrestle with rude Boreas for the possession of the detestable little sham bonnets, which the milliners persist in hanging on the backs of our necks.
Well, here we are at Call & Ketchum’s dry-goods store. Now comes the tug of war: let Job’s mantle fall on my feminine shoulders.
“Have you blue silk?”
Yardstick, entirely ignorant of colors, after fifteen minutes of snail-like research, hands me down a silk that is as green as himself.
Oh! away with these stupid masculine clerks, and give us women, who know by intuition what we want, to the immense saving of our lungs and leather.