At the Age of Eve

by Kate Trimble Sharber

So, with this remark about my shirt-waist, I put aside my longing to write something like George Eliot and make a frank acknowledgment of my skirts. Right glad I ought to be that I have them, too, for I believe that if data were plentiful on the subject we should find that the "mantle of charity" was originally a skirt. "Just like a fool woman," people say leniently, and are willing to let it pass.

I am a girl, then, as you will readily gather from the foregoing, simply by putting one and one together—the shirt-waist and the skirt. I live near a little country town, and am vastly dissatisfied with the cramped stage and meager audience, else why should I be keeping a journal? A journal is not nearly so much a book in which you tell what you do as one in which you tell what you would like to do.

Pray do not imagine from the above that I am longing for a crowded, noisy stage, with lights glittering over tinsel. No, I am not that kind of girl. I like a play of few actors, but where the things happening make the veins of the neck stand out!

In admitting that I do not love the village near which I live I know I run the risk of being considered ill-natured. It would be sweeter of me to make it out a cheery little Cranford of a place, where the tea-kettle steams cozily and drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds. These things do happen, after a modern, American fashion; and the people who own the tea-kettles and the folds are the same as other people all over the world. I have no quarrel with them. Still, I am forced to admit that time hangs so heavy on my hands I wash my hair every other day. Have you ever noticed how often a woman, who has nothing better to do, will wash her hair?

Here, then, is a brief description of the village, with malice toward none, although at times it may sound malicious:

The surrounding country is so beautiful that if you are coming into the town on the train you are ill-prepared for the hideous little railway station, which is the first shock you receive. The floor of this "depot" is dirtier than anything else on earth could be, save the post-office floor, and there is a rusty little stove in the middle of the room close to the box of sand, around which tobacco juice is being eternally spit, spat, or whatever is the correct form of that unlovely verb.

Close to the station are the livery stables, but we shall pass by as quickly as possible; and farther up the street is the Racket Store. Sometimes this place has a very handsome clerk from the city; it is then a busy market. Across the street from the hotel is the millinery establishment, and, if you are on good terms with the milliner, she invites you to come and sit at her front window some mornings just after the eleven-o'clock train has come, so you can get a good view of the interesting drummers.

Most of the local attractions in the way of young men are sturdy farmers, who, like June-bugs, appear for only a few months every summer. The others, dry goods clerks, bookkeepers and professional whittlers, usually line up on the back benches at church on Sunday evenings and cause mild panics in the breasts of the unescorted girls present, whose hearts palpitate painfully during the benediction.

But here I have set forth the doings of Sunday evening before mentioning the events of the afternoon, which, while not exciting, are in a way more characteristic than those of any other time. If the day is fine the country roads blossom forth at irregular intervals with young couples out driving or walking, close to Nature's heart, yet caring far less for her beauties than for the sight of each other, which, after all, is nature. If there is any one in the town sick enough for his neighbors to be really concerned about him, on Sunday afternoon the sick one's house is swarming with a crowd sufficient to furnish forth a funeral. This is not called "profaning the Sabbath," but it ought to be.

On rainy days, or even on fine ones, the inhabitants who are too old to be a-lovering usually sit around and go to sleep in their chairs, with their mouths wide open. Besides being ungraceful, this is an invitation to tonsilitis. Dear me! I have misspelled that word again, for Doctor Osler says there are two l's in it, and I am sure there are—in the kind I had last Christmas!