"The colonel declares he means to bring you to New York, and wishes me to give you my own impressions of this place. Well, all I have to say is 'pray that your flight be not in summer!' Anything like the heat and desolation of this town in summer cannot be imagined. Everybody leaves it. I am living in a tiny house in the heart of the city—and a very hard heart it is! On one side of me is the rear of a great hotel, its kitchens and servants' offices overlooking me. Really, I had as soon hear shrieking shells as the clatter they make with their pots and pans. Behind me is a sash and blind factory yielding dust and noise unspeakable. On the other side a dreadful man has planted a garden, wherein he has spread an awning, and there he holds his revels—his card and wine parties. Of course I can but listen to him more than half the stifling hot nights, but should I remonstrate, it is not improbable he might inform me that this is a free country, which I doubt. Lucy and Fanny fortunately are far away in Virginia, and so I am spared the added discomfort of suffering through their nerves.
"This town is as completely metamorphosed in summer as if it had changed places with some struggling, dusty manufacturing city,—building and digging going on everywhere; ugly dirt-carts, instead of flower-crowned ladies in landaus, passing through the dusty streets. You might, perhaps with reason, suggest that I seem to have leisure,—that this is a fine opportunity to read and improve my mind. Yes, I know, but somehow I have lost all desire to improve my mind! My present inclination is to gratify the mind I already have,—go somewhere, see something, hear some really fine music!
"Here there is nothing to be seen except unhappy fellow-mortals panting beneath the burden of city existence; street arabs making free with the front doorstep and improvising tables for their greasy luncheons; pathetic organ-grinders who lift melancholy eyes for recognition and reward, after harrowing the soul with despairing strains—'Miserere,' 'Ah, I have sighed to rest me,' and such; unmuzzled little animals in mortal terror of the dog-catcher; tired, patient horses who know not their own strength, and quietly obey that other creature with so much less power and so much more selfishness. All this is not cheerful to the looker-out, and having seen it once, I look no more. But I have lately made a discovery. My upper-story window presents an interesting and instructive landscape. There is a low-roofed stable between the hotel and the factory. I can look over a great flat tin roof where snowy garments are always drying, and upon which, like 'Little Dorritt's' lover, I can gaze 'until I 'most think they wuz groves.' Moreover, there is a happy woman who comes up through a trap-door and walks much under the shadow of those groves. How do I know she is happy? Partly by the patter of her busy feet, partly by the bit of song that floats to me 'whiles.' But chiefly because I have actually found out all about her while I have leaned idly out of my window. First, she is very good—this dweller beneath the flat roof.
"On Sunday evenings she tunes up a little melodeon in her regions below, and sings straight through the Moody and Sankey hymn-book. Nor is this all. For a time I could not discover whether she was wife, maid, or mother, and I felt much anxious solicitude in her behalf. But lately she has brought up to the roof in the evenings a small rocking-chair of the Mayflower pattern, some crochet or tatting; and a great cat with an enormous upright tail has followed her, and rubbed himself comfortably against her knees. "She is a blessed little old maid—that's just what she is! But the cat is not the only 'follower.' A wholesome-looking Englishman (side-whiskers, fresh complexion, china aster in buttonhole) comes now and then. The little Mayflower chair rocks a bit more nervously, the cat is overwhelmed with surprise by receiving a slight push from the tidy slipper, the tatting takes on new energy, and I see—well, now, you surely don't expect me to tell you what I see? Nothing very dreadful nor altogether unusual in the sphere of my happy woman and the British coachman, who has her in his 'heye' and is surely going to have her in his 'ome by and by.
"But when my tired general comes home to me and keenly scans my face to discover whether I am pining for the pines or sighing for the sea, I cannot disgrace myself in his eyes by revealing my low interest in my happy woman. Least of all reveal my own loneliness! I show him the lovely little window-box where I have a climbing nasturtium, a morning-glory, and a curious strong vine that has prehensile fingers at the end of every cluster of leaves. I show him the curious ways of these strong climbers—how the nasturtium has no tendrils, but a great fleshy stalk to be supported, and so when it grows too tall to stand alone, it puts forth at intervals a leaf with a mission; as soon as this leaf feels the touch of the string, it contracts and wraps its brittle stalk thrice around it—in and out, as you would wind your ball of silk. And how the great long feelers of the morning-glory behave just like ourselves. They look abroad for something to lean upon, waving restlessly to and fro. Finding nothing, they deliberately turn and lean upon themselves!
"My general pities me because the square of blue sky into which I am always looking is so small. But I tell him of all the glories and marvels I have seen there, between the high stone dwellings that shut it in: how a rainbow spanned it once; how my Lady Moon looks down in some of her phases and tells me of her hard life of hopeless bondage—while mine is but for a little time; how the Pleiades have been seen in my small heaven and bound me with sweetest influences; how my friend, the Great Bear, straddles across for a look at me, and a reminder that he knows me very well, and knew generations of my fathers long before the twenty-three generations that I know of myself.
"And I have still more to tell him of the lovely time I am having in my room—how I have watched a fairy castle grow against my sky. How I saw at first a derrick spring aloft, and then many tiny spirits of the air build away on a square foundation; how they made port-holes in the top looking every way for the Mafia or any other enemy, and over this threw arches and fairy adornment of cunning work in white marble; how they threw up a rocket then and hung out electric lights, and I supposed their work was over and their airy castle finished, but they then mounted a great calcium light to let the incoming ships from foreign lands know our eye is upon them; how they built another and still another story to their castle—four in all, and were still building. And I call his attention to a strange bird coming regularly at the same hour in the evening, sailing (with 'a raucous voice') across our dwelling and into my own little plantation in the sky. He is of the species vulgarly called 'Bat'—and so I named him our Fledermaus. At precisely the same hour every morning has he come back again, screaming triumphantly, or putting on a bold front to account to his mate in Central Park how he had spent the night in the Long Island marshes. The first time the flashlight was kindled in my castle in the air and its searching glance fell upon the recreant Fledermaus, he wheeled around and made his circuit in another direction, and we shall hear his raucous voice no more! "Which is additional proof of what we know already: 'Conscience makes cowards of us all.' Or perhaps it is only that no self-respecting Fledermaus can be expected to countenance flashlights at hours when sensitive folk are coming home in the morning.
"My general listens respectfully while I go through all this. 'Evidently "stone walls do not a prison make,"' is his comment. 'Here are you interested in botany, astronomy, and in building the Madison Square Garden.' 'Garden! Do stone walls a garden make?' 'Here in New York they do,' he tells me; 'a great, hot theatre is to be called a garden and crowned by Diana of the Ephesians! St. Gaudens is making the goddess. But you'll not need gardens or goddesses to make you happy! Ah! What a wonderful woman you are—so content, so cheery in spite of all our privations.' Which shows what poor creatures men are, as far as discernment goes, regarding the ways of women; for my dear, oh, my dear!—a very lonely, homesick, heartsick body is
"Your devoted
"Sara A. Pryor.
"P.S.—I am a wretch—I know I am—to end my letter with a howl. But an organ-man under my window is grinding away at 'Home, Sweet Home.' He must be driven away or I perish! There he goes again—'The Old Folks at Home'! I must put both my sofa pillows over my ears! Dearly, S. A. P."