Records of a Girlhood

by Fanny Kemble

One day, after the Croton water had been brought into New York, I was sitting with the venerable Chancellor Kent at the window of his house in Union Square, and, pointing to the fountain that sprang up in the midst of the inclosure, he said, "When I was a boy, much more than half a century ago, I used to go to the Croton water, and paddle, and fish, and bathe, and swim, and loiter my time away in the summer days. I cannot go out there any more for any of these pleasant purposes, but the Croton water has come here to me." What a ballad Schiller or Goethe would have made of that! That morning visit to Chancellor Kent has left that pretty picture in my mind, and the recollection of his last words as he shook hands with me: "Ay, madam, the secret of life is always to have excitement enough, and never too much." But he did not give me the secret of that secret.]

There are, on an average, half a dozen fires in various parts of the town every night—I mean houses on fire. The sons of all the gentlemen here are volunteer engineers and firemen, and great is the delight they take in tearing up and down the streets, accompanied by red lights, speaking trumpets, and a rushing, roaring escort of running amateur extinguishers, who make night hideous with their bawling and bellowing. This evening as I was observing that we had had no fire to-day, Dall said the weather was so hot, she thought they must have left off fires for the season.

Speaking of carriages and the devices on the panels of them here, which appear to be rather fancy pieces than heraldic bearings, my father said, "I wonder what they do for arms." "Use legs," said Dall immediately, not at all bethinking herself how ancient a device on the shield of the Island of Man the three legs were, or knowing how much more ancient on the coins of Crotona, I think, or some other of the Magna Grecian colonies.

The hours which prevail here are those of our shop-keeping population; they rise and go to business very early, dine at three, which indeed is considered late, take tea at five, and supper at nine, which seems to us very primitive.... The women here are, generally speaking, very pretty little creatures, with a great deal of freshness and brilliancy; they dress in the extreme of the French fashion, and, I suppose from some unfavorable influence of the climate, they lose their beauty prematurely—they become full-blown very early, and their bloom is extremely evanescent; they fade almost suddenly.... There seems to be a great deal of consumption here. The climate is as capricious as ours, with this additional disadvantage, that the extremes of heat and cold are much more intense, and the transitions much more violent, the temperature varying occasionally as much as thirty degrees in the twenty-four hours. I have just left off writing for five minutes to watch the lightning, which is dancing in a fiery ring all round the horizon—summer lightning, no thunder, although the flashes are strong and vivid....

We have had such a tremendous storm—really gorgeous, grand, and awful; lightning that stretched from side to side of the sky, making a blaze like daylight for several seconds at a time. The mere reflection of it on the ground was more than the eye could endure; great forked ribbons of fire darting into the very bosom of the city and its crowded dwellings, or zigzagging through the air to an accompaniment of short, sharp, crackling thunder, succeeded by endless, deep, full-toned rolls that made the whole air shake and vibrate with the heavy concussion; pelting and pouring rain, a perfect tornado of wind. Heaven and earth are all, while I write, one livid, violet-colored flame, and the thunder resounds through the wild frenzy of the elements like the voice of "the Ruler of the spirits." My eyes ache with the incessant glare, and I must close my letter, for it is past eleven o'clock, and I have to rehearse to-morrow morning.... I have seen Mr. Wallack since our arrival, whom I never saw in England, either on or off the stage. I went the other night to see him in one of his favorite pieces, "The Rent-Day," which made me cry dreadfully, but chiefly, I believe, because, when they are ruined, he asks his wife if she will go with him to America. You see I am taking to play-going in my old age. The theater is very pretty, of the best possible dimensions for me, and tolerably good for the voice. We leave this place for Philadelphia on the 10th of October, and remain there a fortnight, and then go on to Boston....

Last Thursday we crossed the Hudson in one of the steamers constantly plying between the opposite shores and New York, and took a delightful walk along the New Jersey shore to a place called Hoboken, famous once as a dueling-ground, now the favorite resort of a pacific society of bon vivants, who meet once a week to eat turtle, or, as it is expressed on their cards of invitation, for "spoon exercise." The distance from our landing-point to the place where these meetings are held is about five miles, a charming walk through a strip of forest-ground, which crowns the banks of the river, gradually rising to a considerable height above it. We were delighted with the vivid, various, and strange foliage of the trees, the magnificent river, broad and blue as a lake, with its high and richly wooded shore, and the sparkling, glittering town opposite. We looked down to the Narrows, the defile through which the waters of this noble estuary reach the Atlantic, and between whose rocky walls two or three ships stood out against the brilliant sky. The ebbing tide plashed on the rocks far below us, and the warm grass through which we walked was alive with grasshoppers, whose scarlet wings, suddenly unfolded when they flew, made me take them for some strange species of butterfly. It was all indescribably bright and joyous-looking, and the air of a transparent clearness that was one of the most striking characteristics of the whole scene, and one of the most delightful.... [In discussing the relative merits of England and America, Dr. Channing once said to me, "The earth is yours, but the heavens are ours;" and I quite agree with him. I have never seen a sky comparable, for splendor of color or translucent purity, to that of the Northern States.]

I have been reading your favorite book, "Salmonia." ... I am rather surprised at your liking it so very much, because, though the descriptions are beautiful, and the natural history interesting, and the philosophical and moral reflections scattered through it delightful, yet there is so much that is purely technical about fishing and its processes, and addressed only to the hook-and-line fraternity, that I should not have thought it calculated to charm you so greatly. However, you may have some associations connected with it; liking is a very complex and many-motived thing....

We went through the fish and fruit markets the other day; unfortunately it was rather late in the morning, and of course the glory of the market was over, but yet there remained enough to enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things. The fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am, placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the downy fruit. It looked like something in the "Arabian Nights;" heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes, in the greatest profusion. I was enchanted with the beautiful forms, bright colors, and fragrant smell, but I saw no flowers, and I have seen hardly any since I have been here, which is rather a grief to me....

Americans are the most extravagant people in the world, and flowers are among them objects of the most lavish expenditure. The prices paid for nosegays, wreaths, baskets, and devices of every sort of hot-house plants, are incredible to any reasonable mind. At parties and balls ladies are laden with costly nosegays which will not even survive the evening's fatigue of carrying them. Dinner and luncheon parties are adorned, not only with masses of exquisite bloom as table ornaments, but by every lady's plate a magnificent nosegay of hot-house flowers is placed; and I knew a lady who, wishing to adorn her ballroom with rather more than usual floral magnificence, had it hung round with garlands of white camellias and myosotis.

At the theater enormously expensive nosegays and huge baskets of forced flowers are handed to the favorite performers from the front of the house, till the ceremony becomes embarrassing, and almost ridiculous for the object of the demonstration. The churches at certain festivals are hung with draperies of costly hot-house flowers; the communion-tables heaped with them. Weddings, of course, are natural occasions for that species of ornament, but in America funerals are as flowery as marriage-feasts; and I have seen there in mid-winter, with the thermometer at fifteen degrees below zero, large crosses, and hearts, and wreaths, made entirely of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, as part of the solemnities of a burial service; and a young girl who died in the flowerless season was not only shrouded in blossoms, but as her coffin was carried to the bosom of the wintry earth, a white pall of the finest material was thrown over it, with a great cross of double forced violets, almost the length of the coffin, laid on it. I have had as many as a dozen huge baskets of camellias, violets, orange-flower, and tuberose, at one time, in my room; perishable tokens of anonymous public and private favor, the cost of which used to fill me with dismay: and on one occasion a table of magnificent hot-house flowers was sent to me, of such dimensions that both sides of the street door had to be opened to admit it. When I have deplored the inordinate amount of money lavished upon that which could only impart pleasure for so brief a time, I have been answered, but not converted from my feeling of disapprobation and regret, that the gardeners profited by this wild extravagance. In New York I have known a guinea paid for a gentleman's button-hole rosebud, and three guineas for half a dozen sprays of lily of the valley.