Here’s Mr. Timothy Tape’s establishment.
“Have you lace collars, (in points,) Mr. Tape?”
Mr. Tape looks beneficent, and shows me some rounded collars. I repeat my request in the most pointed manner for pointed collars. Mr. Tape replies, with a patronizing grin:
“Points is going out, Ma’am.”
“So am I.”
Dear me, how tired my feet are! nevertheless, I must have some merino. So I open the door of Mr. Henry Humbug’s dry-goods store, which is about half a mile in length, and inquire for the desired article. Young Yardstick directs me to the counter, at the extreme end of the store. I commence my travels thitherward through a file of gaping clerks, and arrive there just ten minutes before two, by my repeater; when I am told “they are quite out of merinos; but won’t Lyonnese cloth do just as well?” pulling down a pile of the same. I rush out in a high state of frenzy, and, taking refuge in the next-door neighbor’s, inquire for some stockings. Whereupon the clerk inquires (of the wrong customer,) “What price I wish to pay?” Of course, I am not so verdant as to be caught in that trap; and, teetotally disgusted with the entire institution of shopping, I drag my weary limbs into Taylor’s new saloon, to rest.
Bless me! what a display of gilding, and girls, and gingerbread! what a heap of mirrors! There’s more than one Fanny Fern in the world. I found that out since I came in.
“What will you be pleased to have?” Julius Cæsar! look at that white-aproned waiter pulling out his snuff-box and taking a pinch of snuff right over that bowl of white sugar, that will be handed me in five minutes to sweeten my tea! And there’s another combing his hair with a pocket-comb, over that dish of oysters.
“What will I have?” Starve me, if I’ll have anything, till I can find a cleaner place than this to eat in.