| [16] | By G. H. Hill. |
XXVII.
A SAGE CONVERSATION.
I love the aged matrons of our land. As a class, they are the most pious, the most benevolent, the most useful, and the most harmless of the human family. Their life is a life of good offices. At home, they are patterns of industry, care, economy, and hospitality; abroad, they are ministers of comfort, peace, and consolation. Where affliction is, there are they, to mitigate its pangs; where sorrow is, there are they to assuage its pains. Nor night, nor day, nor summer’s heat, nor winter’s cold, nor angry elements, can deter them from scenes of suffering and distress. They are the first at the fevered couch, and the last to leave it. They hold the first and last cup to the parched lip. They bind the aching head, close the dying eye, and linger in the death-stricken habitation, to pour the last drop of consolation into the afflicted bosoms of the bereaved. I cannot, therefore, ridicule them myself, nor bear to hear them ridiculed in my presence. And yet, I am often amused at their conversations; and have amused them with a rehearsal of their own conversations, taken down by me when they little dreamed that I was listening to them. Perhaps my reverence for their character, conspiring with a native propensity to extract amusement from all that passes under my observation, has accustomed me to pay a uniformly strict attention to all they say in my presence.
This much in extraordinary courtesy to those who cannot distinguish between a simple narrative of an amusing interview, and ridicule of the parties to it. Indeed I do not know that the conversation which I am about to record, will be considered amusing by any of my readers. Certainly the amusement of the readers of my own times is not the leading object of it, or of any of the “Georgia Scenes;” forlorn as may be the hope, that their main object will ever be answered.
My intention is merely to detail a conversation between three ladies, which I heard many years since; confining myself to only so much of it, as sprung from the ladies’ own thoughts, unawakened by the suggestions of others.
I was travelling with my old friend, Ned Brace, when we stopped at the dusk of the evening at a house on the road-side, for the night. Here we found three nice, tidy, aged matrons, the youngest of whom could not have been under sixty; one of them of course was the lady of the house, whose husband, old as he was, had gone from home upon a land-exploring expedition. She received us hospitably, had our horses well attended to, and soon prepared for us a comfortable supper.
While these things were doing, Ned and I engaged the other two in conversation; in the course of which, Ned deported himself with becoming seriousness. The kind lady of the house occasionally joined us, and became permanently one of the party, from the time the first dish was placed on the table.
At the usual hour we were summoned to supper; after which the conversation turned upon marriages, happy and unhappy, strange, unequal, runaways, &c. Ned rose at last, and asked the landlady where we should sleep. She pointed to an open shed-room adjoining the room in which we were sitting, and separated from it by a log partition, between the spaces of which might be seen all that passed in the dining-room; and so close to the fire-place of this apartment, that a loud whisper might be easily heard from one to the other.
I could not resist the temptation of casting an eye through the cracks of the partition to see the effect of Ned’s wonderful stories upon the kind ladies. Mrs. Barney (it is time to give their names) was sitting in a thoughtful posture; her left hand supporting her chin, and her knee supporting her left elbow. Her countenance was that of one who suffers from a slight tooth-ache.
Mrs. Shad leaned forward, resting her fore-arm on her knees, and looking into the fire as if she saw groups of children playing in it. Mrs. Reed, the landlady, who was the fattest of the three, was thinking and laughing alternately at short intervals. From my bed it required but a slight change of position to see any one of the group at pleasure.