Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio. Second SeriesFern, Fanny
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Fern Leaves from Fanny's Port-folio. Second Series
Fern, Fanny
American essays -- 19th century; Short stories, American
Now allow _me_ to suggest. Your thin man should always close the
thorax button of his coat, and the last two at his waistband, leaving
the intermediate open, to give what he needs--more breadth of chest.
Your stout man, who has almost always a nice arm and hand, should have
his coat sleeve a _perfect fit_ from the elbow to the wrist, buttoning
_there tightly_--allowing a nice strip of a white linen wristband below
it.
I understand the architecture of a coat to a charm; know as quick as
a flash whether ’tis all right, the minute I clap my eye on it. As to
vests, I call myself a connoisseur. “_Stocks_” are only fit for Wall
Street! Get yourself some nice silk neck-ties, and ask your wife, or
somebody who knows something, to longitudinize them to your jugular.
Throw your colored, embroidered, and ruffled shirt-bosoms overboard;
leave your cane and cigar at home; wear a pair of neat, _dark_ gloves;
sport an immaculate pocket-handkerchief and dicky--don’t say naughty
words--give us ladies the _inside_ of the walk--speak of every woman as
you would wish _your_ mother or _your_ sister spoken of, and you’ll do!
INCIDENT AT THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY.
To be able to appreciate Mr. Pease’s toils, and sacrifices, and
self-denying labors at the Five Points House of Industry, one must
visit the locality:--one must wind through those dirty streets and
alleys, and see the wrecks of humanity that meet him at every step;--he
must see children so dirty and squalid that they scarcely resemble
human beings, playing in filthy gutters, and using language that would
curdle his blood to hear from _childhood’s_ lips;--he should see men,
“made in God’s own image,” brutalised beyond his power to imagine;--he
should see women (girls of not more than twenty years) reeling about
the pavements in a state of beastly intoxication, without a trace of
feminity in their vicious faces;--he should pass the rum shops, where
men and women are quarreling and fighting and swearing, while childhood
listens and _learns_!--he should pass the second-hand clothes cellars,
where hard-featured Jewish dealers swing out faded, refuse garments,
(pawned by starving virtue for bread,) to sell to the needy, half-naked
emigrant for his last penny;--he should see decayed fruit and
vegetables which the most ravenous swine might well root twice over
before devouring, purchased as daily food by these poor creatures;--he
should see _gentlemen_ (?) threading these streets, not to make all
this misery less, God knows, but to sever the last thread of hope to
which many a tempted one is despairingly clinging.
One must see all this, before he can form a just idea of the
magnitude and importance of the work that Mr. Pease has single-handed
and nobly undertaken; remembering that men of wealth and influence have
their own reasons for using that wealth and influence to perpetuate
this modern Sodom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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