Is it any joke to us to stand vis-a-vis, with a strange man, before a crowd of grinning spectators, while you are disentangling the “Gordian knot,” instead of whipping out your penknife and sacrificing your offending button, as you ought to do?
Is it any joke to see papa scowl, when we ask him for the “needful,” to restore the lace or fringe you tore off our shawl or mantilla?
Do you suppose we can stop to walk gracefully, when our minds have to be in a prepared state to have our pretty little toes crushed, or our bonnets knocked off, or our skirts torn from our belts, or ourselves and our gaiter hoots jostled into a mud-puddle?
Do you ever “keep to the right, as the law directs?” Don’t you always go with your heads hindside before, and then fetch up against us as if we were made of cast-iron? Don’t you put your great lazy hands in your pockets, and tramp along with a cane half a mile long sticking out from under your arm-pits, to the imminent danger of our optics? “Trussed turkeys,” indeed! No wonder, when we are run a-fowl of every other minute.
THE STRAY SHEEP.
“He’s going the wrong way—straying from the true fold; going off the track,” said old Deacon Green, shaking his head ominously, as he saw young Neff enter a church to hear an infidel preacher. “Can’t understand it; he was taught his catechism and ten commandments as soon as he could speak; he knows the right way as well as our parson; I can’t understand it.”
Harry Neff had never seen a day pass since his earliest childhood that was not ushered in and closed with a family prayer. He had not partaken of a repast upon which the divine blessing was not invoked; the whole atmosphere of the old homestead was decidedly orthodox. Novels, plays, and Byronic poetry were all vetoed. Operas, theatres, and the like most decidedly frowned upon; and no lighter literature was allowed upon the table than missionary reports and theological treatises.
Most of his father’s guests being clergymen, Harry was early made acquainted with every crook and turn of orthodoxy. He had laid up many a clerical conversation, and pondered it in his heart, when they imagined his thoughts on anything but the subject in debate. At his father’s request, they had each and all taken him by the button, for the purpose of long, private conversations—the old gentleman generally prefacing his request by the remark that “his heart was as hard as a flint.”
Harry listened to them all with respectful attention, manifesting no sign of impatience, no nervous shrinking from the probing process, and they left him, impressed with a sense of his mental superiority, but totally unable to affect his feelings in the remotest degree.
Such a pity! they all said, that he should be so impenetrable; such wonderful argumentative powers as he had; such felicity of expression; such an engaging exterior. Such a pity! that on all these brilliant natural gifts should not have been written, “Holiness to the Lord.”