Where was the pastor? Oh, he was there—a slight, fragile, scholar-like looking man, with a fine intellectual-looking face, exquisitely refined tastes and sensibilities, and the meek spirit of “the Master.” Had those slender shoulders no cross to bear? When chance sent some fastidious worldling through that vestry door, did it cost him nothing to watch the smile of contempt curl the stranger’s lip, as some uneducated, but well-meaning layman, presented with stammering tongue, in ungrammatical phrase, distorted, one-sided, bigoted views of great truths which his eloquent tongue might have made as clear as the noonday, and as cheering and welcome as heaven’s own blessed light, to the yearning, dissatisfied spirit? Oh, is there nothing in religion, when it can so subdue the pride of intellect as to enable its professor to disregard the stammering tongue, and sit meekly at the feet of the ignorant disciple because he is a disciple?
A BROADWAY SHOP REVERIE.
Forty dollars for a pocket-handkerchief! My dear woman! you need a strait-jacket, even though you may be the fortunate owner of a dropsical purse.
I won’t allude to the legitimate use of a pocket-handkerchief; I won’t speak of the sad hearts that “forty dollers,” in the hands of some philanthropist, might lighten; I won’t speak of the “crows’ feet” that will he pencilled on your fair face, when your laundress carelessly sticks the point of her remorseless smoothing iron through the flimsy fabric, or the constant espionage you must keep over your treasure in omnibuses, or when promenading; but I will ask you how many of the lords of creation, for whose especial benefit you array yourself, will know whether that cobweb rag fluttering in your hand cost forty dollars or forty cents?
Pout if you like, and toss your head, and say that you “don’t dress to please the gentlemen.” I don’t hesitate to tell you (at this distance from your finger nails) that is a downright——mistake! and that the enormous sums most women expend for articles, the cost of which few, save shopkeepers and butterfly feminines, know, is both astounding and ridiculous.
True, you have the sublime gratification of flourishing your forty-dollar handkerchief, of sporting your twenty-dollar “Honiton collar,” or of flaunting your thousand-dollar shawl, before the envious and admiring eyes of some weak sister, who has made the possible possession of the article in question a profound and life-time study; you may pass, too, along the crowded pavé, labouring under the hallucination, that every passer-by appreciates your dry-goods value. Not a bit of it! Yonder is a group of gentlemen. You pass them in your promenade; they glance carelessly at your tout ensemble, but their eyes rest admiringly on a figure close behind you. It will chagrin you to learn that this locomotive loadstone has on a seventy-five cent hat of simple straw, a dress of lawn one shilling per yard, a twenty-five cent collar, and a shawl of the most unpretending price and fabric.
All these items you take in at a glance, as you turn upon her your aristocratic eye of feminine criticism, to extract, if possible, the talismanic secret of her magnetism. What is it? Let me tell you. Nature, wilful dame, has an aristocracy of her own, and in one of her independent freaks has so daintily fashioned your rival’s limbs that the meanest garb could not mar a grace, nor the costliest fabric add one. Compassionating her slender purse, nature has also added an artistic eye, which accepts or rejects fabrics and colours with unerring taste; hence her apparel is always well chosen and harmonious, producing the effect of a rich toilet at the cost of “a mere song;” and as she sweeps majestically past, one understands why Dr. Johnson pronounced a woman to be “perfectly dressed when one could never remember what she wore.”
Now, I grant you, it is very provoking to be eclipsed by a star without a name—moving out of the sphere of “upperten”-dom—a woman who never wore a “camel’s hair shawl” or owned a diamond in her life; after the expense you have incurred, too, and the fees you have paid to Mesdames Pompadour and Stewart for the first choice of their Parisian fooleries. It is harrowing to the sensibilities. I appreciate the awkwardness of your position; still, my compassion jogs my invention vainly for a remedy—unless, indeed, you consent to crush such democratic presumption, by labelling the astounding price of the dry-goods upon your aristocratic back.
“THE OLD WOMAN.”
Look into yonder window! What do you see? Nothing new, surely; nothing but what the angels have looked smilingly down upon since the morning stars first sang together; nothing but a loving mother hushing upon her faithful breast a wailing babe, whose little life hangs by a slender thread. Mortal lips have said, “The boy must die!”