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
“All the world and his wife” are travelling; and a nice day it is to
commence a journey. How neat and tasteful those ladies look in their
drab travelling dresses; how self-satisfied their cavaliers, freshly
shaved and shampooed, in their brown linen over-alls. What apoplectic
looking carpet-bags; full of newspapers, and oranges, and bon-bons,
and novels, and night-caps! Saratoga, Newport, Niagara, White Hills,
Mammoth Cave--of these, the ladies chatter.
Well, here come the cars. Band-boxes, trunks, baskets, and bundles
are counted, and checks taken; a grave discussion is solemnly held,
as to which side of the cars the sun shines on; seats are chosen with
due deliberation, and the locomotive does its own “puffing” to the
bystanders, and darts off.
It is noon! How intense the heat; how annoying the dust; how crowded
the cars; how incessant the cries of that poor tired baby! The ladies’
bonnets are getting awry, their foreheads flushed, and their smooth
tresses unbecomingly _frowsed_, (see Fern Dictionary.) Now their little
chattering tongues have a reprieve, for Slumber has laid her leaden
finger on each drooping eyelid: even Alexander Smith’s new poem has
slidden from between taper fingers. Dream not lovingly of the author,
fair sleeper: poets and butterflies lose their brilliancy when caught.
How intensely ugly men look asleep! doubled up like so many
jack-knives--sorry looking “blades”--with their mouths wide open, and
their limbs twisted into all sorts of Protean shapes. Stay; there’s one
in yonder corner who is an exception. That man knows it is becoming to
him to go to sleep. He has laid his head against the window and taken
off his hat, that the wind might lift those black curls from his broad
white brow;--he knows that his eye-lashes are long and dark, and that
his finely chiselled lips need no defect-concealing moustache;--he
knows that he can afford to turn towards us his fine profile, with its
classical outline;--he knows that his cravat is well tied, and that the
hand upon which he supports his cheek is both well-formed and daintily
white. Wonder if he knows anything else?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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