Folly as It Flies; Hit at by Fanny Fern

by Fanny Fern

O live in Boston is to feel necessitated to wear your "Sunday clothes" all through the week. To live in New York is to wear a loose wrapper every day in the seven if you choose, without danger of being sent to Coventry for so doing; not because Gotham admires your wrapper, but because it has not time or inclination to overhaul so minute a circumstance. In New York, you may wash your one pair of stockings every night; or you may have seven changes of the same for all New York will care about it. In Boston the pedigree of your stockings, shawls, and bonnets is, by no contrivance of ingenuity, hidden. In New York, good Christians can take a walk on Sunday, if it does not lead straight to the church door. In Boston, one perils his salvation, and business standing, by taking a breath of air that has not first blown round a pulpit. In Boston, a rich man or woman must, in public places, keep within the talismanic circle marked out for them, nor cross the line of demarkation at peril of non-recognition. In New York a rich man or woman, by virtue of such position, feels at liberty to take any loafer-ish jump over the customary fence that inclination shall dictate. In Boston, the literary knee is not literary, if it has not knelt before certain shrines. In New York, if it is a genuine knee, it may kneel or not kneel, so far as perilling its safe foundation is concerned. In Boston, one who carries a parcel is supposed not to be able to hire it sent. In New York one may carry a double armful, without being suspected of living at the Five Points. In Boston, people settle your claims to notice by inquiring if you know Mr. This or visit Mrs. That. New York is more interested to know, whether you are eligible by virtue of good manners, and general jolliness, without reference to your tailor, hatter, or dressmaker. In New York, if you choose only to board two servants instead of five, and decline wasting your life in superintending their neglect of upholstery, silver, and china, your intelligence, and irreproachable grammar, are considered an equivalent. In Boston, under such circumstances, the golden gate turns not on its hinges to let you into the crystal city.

In other words, well as I love old Boston—and I do love it—I must own that it is a snob of the first water. It makes a vast difference what my opinion is, of course; but for all that, when Boston stays all its life in Boston, it becomes fossilized, mummy-ized, swathed round and round, from neck to heel, so that growth and expansion are morally impossible.

Still, let Boston always be born in Boston; but after it grows vigorous, if it would stay vigorous, and not get the cramp of self-conceit till it can't turn its "Boston neck," no matter how loudly the wheel of progress is dashing past, let it migrate betimes to New York; where it will get wholesomely thumped and bumped, and its conservative corns pounced upon by the rushing crowd; who will knock its respectable shiny hat over its eyes fifty times a day, all the same as though it was not one of the "highly respectable citizens," the state of whose kitchen-chimney is gravely reported to a gaping universe, in their daily papers.

I don't know what would become of New York had it not its Paradise in the Central Park. I never go there without blessing its originator, and wishing it might be baptized with a more suggestive and prettier name. But never mind names. In its lovely October dress, with its sparkling lake, and drooping willows, its white swans, its lovely velvet greensward; the myriads of sweet children alighting here and there, in their bits of gay dresses, like little humming birds or orioles, with happy mothers and fathers who have left their cares and frets in the city, and come there to be young again for too brief an hour, with the little ones; all this is a picture to feast the eye and gladden the heart. In one respect Central Park might borrow a hint from Boston Common. There the little children are allowed to run upon the grass at all times; not on certain days of the month or week as in Central Park. Said a bright little child of six the other day, when asked if it would like to go to Central Park: "No! (emphatically) no! I don't want to waste my time going where they won't let me step on the grass."

I sometimes wish that the policeman on duty there—so Argus-eyed to arrest the tiny shoe, when temptation is too strong for childhood which has always been cooped within city limits—would bestow some of their notice upon the men-loafers who stretch themselves at full length upon benches, occupying them to the exclusion of the children; puffing vile tobacco, and making a spittoon of the path through which ladies pass. It strikes me there might be an improvement on the strain-at-a-gnat and swallow-a-camel system now in vogue there.

To return to Boston, which I always like to do occasionally: that city needs not our Central Park drives, with its lovely and easily accessible environs.

Here in New York one does not get to the environs until it is time to come home; what with clogged streets and ferry-boats, and Babel-hindrances too numerous to mention, such as scratched sides of the pet carriage, and often-recurring "locked wheels," the fright of prostrate horses, and the music of profanity, from the lips of hurried and irate drivers of teams, and drays, in every direction. All this is death to the repose one seeks in "a drive." Therefore we New Yorkers love our quiet accessible Central Park. May its boundaries be limitless as our tax bills! I couldn't say more. But my first love—that dear old gem of a Boston Common! How happy were the Saturday and Wednesday afternoons, when, under the blessed old school system, before children were forced with grammar and geography, like hot-house plants,—and we had short forenoon and afternoon sessions, with the exception of the above-mentioned holidays; how happy were the afternoons I spent there, picking buttercups, and blowing off thistledown, "to see if mothers wanted us at home;" which by the way, was sure to be answered in the negative. And as to the Frog-Pond—what was the Atlantic Ocean to that? On the Atlantic Ocean, they had dreadful ship-wrecks; on the Boston Frog-Pond, we sent out our tiny ventures, sure to find safe arrivals when we ran round the other side of the Pond. And the big Tree—hooped all round like a modern belle—with what big eyes of wonder we looked up into its branches, as our elders told us wonderful stories of what it had seen in its long, eventful life. And now there are many big trees where little ones used to stand. Bless me! it shows how old I must be; just as it does to go back there and meet in the street some radiant fresh young girl, "the very image of her mother," with whom I used to play buttercups, on Saturday afternoons. There are the same bright eyes, and lovely hair, and smiling lips—bless me, how old I really must be! and why don't I walk with a stick?

And then I laugh as I look up at Boston State-House and its awe-inspiring dome of our childhood; and recall the "members of the Legislature," crawling up and down stairs and galleries like great black ants; and think of the terrific "Inquisition"-doings which we used to be sure must be going on, inside those wonderful halls, and to which Blue-Beard's locked apartment was nothing. Oh, it is all very funny now, when I go there; and though I sit on a seat in the Common, and try to conjure all the myriad hours, and days, and years, between then and now, and try to feel like the second Methusaleh I am, I declare to you I never can do it,—but, instead, catch myself trotting off home under the trees, as briskly as a squirrel. I suppose, some day, I shall be dead though, for all that.