Editor's Easy Chair.
Since we last chatted with our readers, a month ago, old Autumn has fairly taken the year upon his shoulders, and is bearing him in his parti-colored jacket, toward the ice-pits of Winter. The soft advance of Indian Summer, with its harvest moons round and red, and its sunsets deep-dyed with blood and gold, is stealing smokily across the horizon, and witching us to a last smile of warmth, and to a farewell summer joyousness.
The town has changed, too, like the season: and the streets are all of them in the hey-day of the Autumn flush. The country merchants are gone home, and the Southern loiterers are creeping lazily southward—preaching the best of Union discourses—with their geniality and their frankness. The old Broadway hours of promenade are coming again; and you can see blithe new-married couples, and wishful lovers, at morning and evening, lighting up the trottoir with their sunshine. The wishful single ones too, are wearing new fronts of hope, as the town-men settle again into their winter beat, and feel, in their bachelor chambers, the lack of that stir of sociality, which enlivens the summer of the springs.
Old married people too—not so joyous as once—forget all the disputes of the old winter, in the pleasant approaches of a new one; and try hard to counterfeit a content which they esteem and desire.
But with all its gayety, theatre-running, concert-going, and shopping, the town wears underneath a look of sad sourness. Merchants that were as chatty as the most loquacious magpies only a five-month gone, are suddenly grown as gruff and dumb as the Norwegian bears. The tightness of Wall-street has an uncommon "effect upon facial muscles;" and men that would have been set down by the "Medical Examiners" as good for a ten years' lease of life, are now wearing a visage that augurs any thing but healthy action of the liver.
Even our old friends that we parted from in May, as round and dimpled as country wenches, have met us the week past with a rueful look, and have said us as short a welcome as if we were their creditors. We pity sadly the poor fellow, who, with a firm reliance on the steady friendship of his old companion, goes to him in these times for a loan of a "few thousands." Friendship has a hard chance for a livelihood nowadays in Wall-street; and the man that would give us an easy shake of the hand when we met him on 'Change in the spring, will avoid us now as if he feared contagion from our very look.
The fat old gentlemen who used to loll into our office in May-time, to read the journals, and crack stale jokes, and quietly puff out one or two of our choice Regalias, have utterly vanished. We find no invitations to dine upon our table—no supper cards for a "sit-down" to fried oysters and Burgundy "punctually at nine."
Wall-street is the bugbear that frights New York men out of all their valor; and, as is natural enough, Wall-street, and specie, and heavy imports; and a new tariff, and the coming crop of cotton are just now at the top of the talk of the town.
Let our good readers then, allow for this incubus, in tracing the jottings down, this month, of our usually gossiping pen. Let them remember in all charity that two per cent. a month, for paper good as the bank, makes a very poor stimulant for such pastime as literary gossip. When our men of business replace their Burgundy and Lafitte of 1841, with merely merchantable Medoc, readers surely will be content with a plain boiled dish, trimmed off with a few carrots, in place of the rich ragouts, with which, at some future time, we shall surely tickle their appetite.