I couldn’t do it, said Mrs. Penlimmon. Long before that time I should be as placid as an oyster. “Three breaths!” I could double Cape Horn in that time. I’m telegraphic,—if I had to stop to reflect, I should never be saucy. I can’t hold anger any more than an April sky can retain showers; the first thing I know, the sun is shining. You may laugh, but that’s better than one of your foggy dispositions, drizzling drops of discomfort a month on a stretch; no computing whether you’ll have anything but gray clouds overhead the rest of your life. No: a good heavy clap of thunder for me—a lightning flash; then a bright blue sky and a clear atmosphere, and I am ready for the first flower that springs up in my path.
“Three breaths!” how absurd! as if people, when they get excited, ever have any breath, or if they have, are conscious of it. I should like to see the Solomon who got off that sage maxim. I should like better still to give him an opportunity to test his own theory! It’s very refreshing to see how good people can be, when they have no temptation to sin; how they can sit down and make a code of laws for the world in general and sinners in particular.
“Three breaths!” I wouldn’t give a three-cent piece for anybody who is that long about anything. The days of stage coaches have gone by. Nothing passes muster now but comets, locomotives and telegraph wires. Our forefathers and foremothers would have to hold the hair on their heads if they should wake up in 1854. They’d be as crazy as a cat in a shower-bath, at all our whizzing and rushing. Nice old snails! It’s a question with me whether I should have crept on at their pace, had I been a cotemporary. Christopher Columbus would have discovered the New World much quicker than he did, had I been at his elbow.
LITTLE BESSIE;
OR, MISS PRIM’S MODEL SCHOOL.
School is out! What stretching of limbs; what unfettering of tongues and heels; what tossing-up of pinafores and primers; what visions of marbles, and hoops, and dolls, and apples, and candy, and gingerbread! How welcome the fresh air; how bright the sunshine; how tempting the grassy playground! Ah, there’s a drop of rain—there’s another; there’s a thunder clap! “Just as school is out—how provoking!” echo a score of voices; and the pouting little prisoners huddle together in the school-house porch, and console themselves by swapping jack-knives and humming tops, and telling marvellous stories of gypsies and giants; while Miss Prim, the dyspeptic teacher, shakes her head and the ferule, and declares that the former will “fly into fifty pieces;” upon which some of the boys steal out of doors and amuse themselves by sounding the puddles with their shoes, while others slyly whittle the desks, or draw caricatures on their slates, of Miss Prim’s long nose.
Drip, drip—spatter, spatter! How the rain comes down, as if it couldn’t help it; no prospect of “holding up.”
Here come messengers from anxious mothers, with India rubbers, extra tippets, and umbrellas; and there’s a chaise at the door, for Squire Lenox’s little rosy daughter; and a wagon for the two Prince girls; and a stout Irish girl, with a blanket shawl, to carry home little lame Minnie May, who is as fragile as a lily, and just as sweet. And there’s a servant man for Master Simpkins, the fat dunce with the embroidered jacket, whose father owns “the big Hotel, and wishes his son to have a seat all by himself.”