Well; there was a pauper funeral, and a report about that a child had been “frightened to death at school;” but Bessie’s mother was a poor woman, consequently the righteous Committee “didn’t feel called upon to interfere with such idle reports.”
THE DELIGHTS OF VISITING.
What is it to go away on a visit? Well, it is to take leave of the little velvet rocking-chair, which adjusts itself so nicely to your shoulders and spinal column; to cram, jam, squeeze, and otherwise compress your personal effects into an infinitesimal compass; to be shook, jolted, and tossed, by turns, in carriage, railroad and steamboat; to be deafened with the stentorian lungs of cab-drivers, draymen, and porters; to clutch your baggage as if every face you saw were a highwayman (or to find yourself transported with rage, at finding it transported by steam to Greenland or Cape Horn). It is to reach your friend’s house, travel-stained, cold and weary, with an unbecoming crook in your bonnet; to be utterly unable to get the frost out of your tongue, or “the beam into your eye,” and to have the felicity of hearing some strange guest remark to your friend, as you say an early good-night, “Is it possible THAT is your friend, Miss Grey?”
It is to be ushered into the “best chamber” (always a north one) of a cold January night; to unhook your dress with stiffened digits; to find everything in your trunk but your nightcap; to creep between polished linen sheets, on a congealed mattress, and listen to the chattering of your own teeth until daylight.
It is to talk at a mark twelve hours on the stretch; to eat and drink all sorts of things which disagree with you; to get up sham fits of enthusiasm at trifles; to learn to yawn circumspectly behind your finger-tips; to avoid all allusion to topics unsuited to your pro tem. latitude; to have somebody for ever at your nervous elbow, trying to make you “enjoy yourself;” to laugh when you want to cry; to be loquacious when you had rather be taciturn; to have mind and body in unyielding harness, for lingering, consecutive weeks; and then to invite your friends, with a hypocritical smile, to play the same farce over with you, “whenever business or pleasure calls them” to Frog-town!
HELEN HAVEN’S “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”
“I’m miserable; there’s no denying it,” said Helen. “There’s nothing in this endless fashionable routine of dressing, dancing, and visiting, that can satisfy me. Hearts enough are laid at my feet, but I owe them all to the accidents of wealth and position. The world seems all emptiness to me. There must be something beyond this, else why this ceaseless reaching of the soul for some unseen good? Why do the silent voices of nature so thrill me? Why do the holy stars with their burning eyes utter such silent reproaches? Have I nothing to do but amuse myself with toys like a child? Shall I live only for myself? Does not the sun that rises upon my luxury, shine also upon the tear-stained face of sorrow? Are there not slender feet stumbling wearily in rugged, lonely paths? Why is mine flower-bestrewn? How am I better? Whose sorrowful heart have I lightened? What word of comfort has fallen from my lips on the ear of the grief-stricken? What am I here for? What is my mission?”
“And you have only this wretched place to nurse that sick child in?” said Helen; “and five lesser ones to care for? Will you trust that sick child with me?”
“She is not long for this world, my lady; and I love her as well as though I had but one. Sometimes I’ve thought the more care I have for her, the closer my heart clings to her. She is very patient and sweet.”