In the matter of dress, our grandames seem to have pushed the ruling passion of the sex even through the rigid crust of Puritanism. In a tract, called the “Simple Cobler of Agawam,” some righteous round-head thus expresses his indignation at their fashions:—
“Methinks it should break the hearts of Englishmen to see so many goodly Englishwomen imprisoned in French cages, peering out of their hood-holes for some men of mercy to help them with a little wit, and nobody relieves them. We have about five or six of them in our colony; if I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my phansie of them for a month after.
“It is a more common than convenient saying, that ‘nine taylors make a man:’ it were well if nineteen could make a woman to her mind. If taylors were men, indeed, well furnished but with mere moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like asses by such mymick marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them, to spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for women’s phansies.
“It is known more than enough that I am neither niggard nor cynic to the true bravery of the true gentry. I am not much offended if I see a trimme far trimmer than she that wears it; but when I hear a nugiperous gentle dame inquire what dress the queen is in, with egge to be in it in all haste, whatever it be, I look to her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cypher, the epitome of nothing, fitter to be kickt, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honoured, or humoured.”
MOUNT JEFFERSON,
(FROM MOUNT WASHINGTON.)
In looking in this direction from the elevated summit of Mount Washington, the eye drops upon a region of climate entirely different from that on its south-eastern side. The towns of Lancaster and Jefferson, though something north of the White Mountains, enjoy a benign, tranquil atmosphere, such as is not known for two or three hundred miles farther south, and with the beauty of the scenery and the number of water-courses, it is a little Arcadia in the bosom of the north. The peculiar climate felt here, is owing to the proximity of the White Mountains, which form a wall of thirty miles from north to south, either checking entirely the easterly winds, or elevating them into a region far above the surface. The westerly winds, again, impinging against the mountains, (but in an elevated part,) are arrested, leaving the towns below in the same tranquillity as is felt by a person coming near a large building in a high wind.