The manners of the people were strange to us, and different from ours. The ladies seemed to have gone ahead of the men in the “march of progress”—their manner being more pronounced. They did not hesitate to “push about” through crowds and public places.
Still, we were young; and dazzled with the gloss and glitter, we wondered why old Virginia couldn’t join this “march of progress,” and have dumb-waiters, and elevators, and water-pipes, and gas fixtures, and baby jumpers, and washing machines.
We asked a gentleman who was with us, why old Virginia had not all these, and he replied: “Because, while the people here have been busy working for themselves, old fogy Virginia has been working for negroes. All the money Virginia makes is spent in feeding and clothing negroes. And,” he continued, “these people in the North were shrewd enough years ago to sell all their’s to the South.”
All was strange to us; even the table-cloths on the tea and breakfast tables instead of napkins under the plates as we had at home, and which always looked so pretty on the mahogany.
But the novelty having worn off after awhile, we found out there was a good deal of “imitation,” after all, mixed up in everything. Things did not seem to have been “fixed up” to last as long as our old things at home, and we began to wonder if the “advanced age” really made the people any better, or more agreeable, or more hospitable, or more generous, or more brave, or more self-reliant, or more charitable, or more true, or more pious, than in “old fogy Virginia?”
There was one thing most curious to us in New York. No one seemed to do anything by himself or herself. No one had an individuality; all existed in “clubs” or “societies.” They had also many “isms” of which we had never heard; some of the people sitting up all night, and going around all day talking about “manifestations,” and “spirits,” and “affinities,” which they told us was “spiritualism.”
All this impressed us slow, old fashioned Virginians, as a strangely up-side-down, wrong-side-out condition of things.
Much of the conversation we heard was confined to asking questions of strangers, and discussing the best means of making money.
We were surprised too to hear of “plantation customs” said to exist among us which were entirely new to us; and one of the Magazines published in the city informed us that “dipping” was one of the “characteristics” of Southern women. What could the word “dipping” mean? we wondered, for we had never heard it before. Upon inquiry we found that it meant “rubbing the teeth with snuff on a small stick”—a truly disgusting habit which could not have prevailed in Virginia, or we would have had some tradition of it at least—our acquaintance extending over the State, and our ancestors having settled there two hundred years ago.
A young gentleman from Virginia—bright and overflowing with fun, also visiting New York—coming into the parlor one day threw himself on a sofa in a violent fit of laughter.