—Madame then caught up the widow’s little boy, and, half smothering him with kisses, declared that there was nothing on earth she loved so well as children; that there were half a dozen of them in the house, who loved her better than their own fathers and mothers, and that their devotion to her was at times quite touching—(and here she drew out an embroidered pocket handkerchief, and indulged in an interesting little sniffle behind its cambric folds.) Recovering herself, she went on to say, that the manner in which some boarding-house keepers treated children, was perfectly inhuman: that she had a second table for them, to be sure, but it was loaded with delicacies, and that she always put them up a little school lunch herself; on which occasion there was always an amicable little quarrel among them, as to which should receive from her the greatest number of kisses; also, that it was her frequent practice to get up little parties and tableaux, for their amusement. “But here is my daughter, Miss Clara,” said she, introducing a fair-haired young damsel, buttoned up in a black velvet jacket, over a flounced skirt.
“Just sixteen yesterday,” said Madame: “naughty little blossom, budding out so fast, and pushing her poor mamma off the stage;” (and here Madame paused for a compliment, and looking in the opposite mirror, smoothed her jetty ringlets complacently.) “Yes, every morning little blossom’s mamma looks in the glass, expecting to find a horror of a gray hair. But what makes my little pet so pensive to-day?—thinking of her little lover, hey? Has the naughty little thing a thought she does not share with mamma? But, dear me!”—and Madame drew out a little dwarf watch; “I had quite forgotten it is the hour Mons. Guigen gives me my guitar lesson. Adieu, dinner at six, remember;”—and Madame tripped, coquettishly, out of the room.
Yes; “dinner at six.” Gold salt-cellars, black waiters, and finger-bowls; satin chairs in the parlor, and pastilles burning on the side-table; but the sheets on the beds all torn to ribbons; the boarders allowed but one towel a week; every bell-rope divorced from its bell; the locks all out of order on the chamber doors; the “dear children’s” bill of fare at the “second table”—sour bread, watery soup, and cold buckwheat cakes;—and “dinner at six,” only an invention of the enemy, to save the expense of one meal a day—the good, cozy, old-fashioned tea.
Well, the boarders were all “trusteed” by Madame’s butcher, baker and milkman; Miss Clara eloped with the widow’s diamond ring and Mons. Peneke; and Madame, who had heard that Mons. Finfillan was “among the things that were,” was just about running off with Mons. Guigen, when her liege lord suddenly returned from California, with damaged constitution and morals, a dilapidated wardrobe and empty coffers.
Moral. Beware of boarding-houses: in the words of Shakspeare,
Let those keep house who ne’er kept house before
And those who have kept house, keep house the more.
A GRUMBLE FROM THE (H)ALTAR.
This is the second day I’ve come home to dinner, without that yard of pink ribbon for Mrs. Pendennis. Now, we shall have a broil, not down in the bill of fare. Julius Cæsar; if she only knew how much I have to do; but it would make no difference if she did. I used to think a fool was easily managed. Mrs. Pendennis has convinced me that that was a mistake. If I try to reason with her, she talks round and round in a circle, like a kitten chasing its tail. If I set my arms a-kimbo, and look threatening, she settles into a fit of the sulks, to which a November drizzle of a fortnight’s duration is a millenium. If I try to get round her by petting, she is as impudent as the——. Yes, just about. Jerusalem! what a thing it is to be married! And yet, if an inscrutable Providence should bereave me of Mrs. Pendennis, I am not at all sure——good gracious, here she comes! Do you know I’d rather face one of Colt’s revolvers this minute, than that four feet of womanhood? Isn’t it astonishing, the way they do it?