A NEW CHAPTER OF MRS. ALLANBY’S EXPERIENCE.
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BY MRS. A. M. F. ANNAN.
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“My dear Mary—I know it will be a pleasure to you to become acquainted with my friends who will hand you this—Mrs. Dilberry and her two daughters. They are quite the aristocracy of our town, being very genteel, as you will find, and also independent as to property. They will be entire strangers in your city, and as they have made up their minds to take a trip there, (having the means, they intend to travel a great deal,) it is nothing but proper in me to give them this letter of introduction.”
Such was the exordium of a letter signed “Catherine Conolly,” and dated from “Tarry-town,” which I found on the centre-table one morning, after having been down the street to attend to a little business—giving a small order to a confectioner. The writer was an old school-mate of mine, whom, indeed, I had not seen since our school-days. She was Kitty Colville then—a fair, fat, freckled, squashy-looking girl, who was a sort of common favorite from the good-nature with which she bore being the butt of our tricks, and the scape-goat of our trespasses. She afterward married a young country doctor, and, as I had learned, was settled in some out-of-the-way village of which I had never known the name until I saw it at the head of her letter. I caught myself smiling as I laid down the missive, it was so characteristic of poor Kitty. After telling about her children, four in number, who were called after their grandfathers and grandmothers, John and Jacob, and Ruth and Sophia; and her husband, who had so much practice that he wore out a pair of saddle-bags every two years, she had filled the remainder of her page with apologies for her pen, ink, and bad writing. The neat but constrained chirography, into which she had been drilled at school by a teacher standing over her, had deteriorated into a scrawl, cramped here and straggling there, and the orthography testified that she no longer wrote with a dictionary at her elbow. “To chronicle small-beer,” it was very evident, had long been the extent of her literary efforts.
My heart always warms at the memory of my early days, and of those in any way pleasantly connected with them, and I felt glad to have an opportunity to prove to my old companion that I still remembered her with kindness. I took up the three cards which had been left with the letter. They had all been cut out of Bristol-board, and that not by square and rule. The first was inscribed with ink in a large, round hand, “Mrs. Dilberry, Tarry-town,” with the addition, in pencil, of “W—— Hotel.” The second was got up in similar style, the name being “Miss Esther Ann Dilberry”—both having the down-strokes dotted and scalloped for ornament. The third was still more ambitious—“Miss Jane Louisa Dilberry” being encircled with a painted wreath of roses, torches, doves, and quivers, with other etceteras, the execution of which, on watch papers and other fancy wares, was once indispensable to the perfection of young-lady-craft. They were any thing but comme-il-faut, but recollecting that my future acquaintances were from a region where cards were by no means a necessary of life, I thought it unfair to make them the basis of any prejudications. To give my correspondent the due of prompt action upon her letter, I set off without delay for the W—— Hotel, though I could not well spare the time for a long walk and a visit, for I had invited a small party to tea, to meet an agreeable Englishman and his accomplished wife, to whom my husband owed the rights of hospitality, and my preparations were yet to be made. The ladies had not returned to the hotel when I reached it, and leaving my card with an invitation to tea penciled upon it, and the hour specified, I hastened home.
The hour for tea had arrived and my company had nearly all assembled, when I heard strange voices on the stairway, and presuming them to be those of the party from the W—— Hotel, I stepped out, to go through the ceremony of introduction with them, before presenting them to the rest of my guests. I was right in my conjecture, though their appearance was such as to take me aback considerably. Mrs. Dilberry was a short, coarse, oily-looking woman, with very light, round eyes, a low, slender nose, almost hidden between a pair of puffy, red cheeks, and a plump mouth, turned down at the corners. Though it was a warm summer evening, she was dressed in a heavy reddish brown silk, with a cape of the same. The remainder of her costume was a fine, though out-of-fashion French-work collar, a cap of coarsely-figured net, trimmed with thick cotton lace, intermixed with a quantity of common, deep-pink artificial flowers, of which the green leaves looked like plain glazed paper, and a very coarse pocket-handkerchief, with which she fanned herself incessantly. Her daughters, whose names she pronounced as Easter Ann and Jane Louyza, were quite as little prepossessing. The elder, who must have been thirty, was tall, spare and sour, with a sallow complexion, and a little turned up nose, quite out of proportion with her long upper lip, and the general dimensions of her face. The other, who looked ten years younger, was a youthful likeness of the mother, short, fat, and florid. From her manner it was apparent that she set up for a beauty. They both had on summer dresses—that of Miss Esther Ann having straight, perpendicular stripes, which made her look still taller, while the dumpiness of the sister seemed to be increased by one of a horizontal or run-round pattern; and they both wore clumsy, high-colored head trimmings, which had been somewhat in vogue the winter of the preceding year.
“Dear me!” exclaimed the old lady, wiping her face with her handkerchief, “I am so flustered and fagged out!”
“We had such a time hunting up a cap for maw,” rejoined Miss Jane Louisa.