Called to see her every evening—substantial victuals didn't agree with me—a kind word from her was a good breakfast—a tender glance has served me for a dinner many a time, and once when she pressed my hand I couldn't eat anything for a fortnight but oranges, cream-candy, and vanilla-beans.
We went to the theatre, endured the negro minstrels, and braved the horrors of a second-rate Italian Opera Company—in fact, everywhere, where there was anything to be seen or heard, there were Calanthe Maria, and her devoted Philander.
For a month I forgot my debts, neglected business, ignored entirely this mundane sphere, and lived in a rainbow-colored aerial castle, of the most elegant finish—surrounded by roses, attended by cupids, and just big enough for Calanthe Maria and the subscriber.
In that happy place there were no duns, no tailors' bills, no trouble, no debts, no getting up early cold mornings, no tight boots, no bad cigars: nothing but love, luxury, and Calanthe Maria.
Came down occasionally out of my airy mansion, to speak a few words of compassion to my companions in the office, who hadn't got any Calanthe, but I went right back again as quick as I could to that rose-colored dream-land where love and Calanthe were "boss and all hands."
At last, one fatal evening I was undeceived.
We were waltzing, and through some clumsiness on my part, her hair caught in a gas-fixture—some mysterious string broke, and those glossy ringlets, the object of my adoration, came off, leaving her head bald as a brickbat. Relating this scrape of the locks to a friend, he informed me that the rest of her charms would not bear minute inspection, for she wore false teeth, and bought her complexion at Phalon's; that her graceful form was the result of a skilful combination of cotton and whalebone.
This was too much. While I thought Calanthe a woman, I loved her, but the discovery of the fishy element excited a prejudice—as a female, she had my affection, and I contemplated matrimony—as a land mermaid, I had no desire to swindle Barnum and become her proprietor.
Coming as I did, from a section of the country where they have human women, and where they don't attempt to deceive masculine mankind with French millinery strategy, I was unprepared for counterfeits, and had been easily deluded by a spurious article. But I find that in New York, perambulating bundles of dry goods not unfrequently pass current as women—and the milliners now put their eccentric inventions upon these locomotive shams, to the great neglect of those revolving waxen ladies who used to perform their perpetual gyrations in the show-windows.
As an advertising medium, they possess facilities for publicity beyond any of the newspapers, having a city circulation, which is unattainable by anything dumb and unpetticoated.