High Life in New York: A series of letters to Mr. Zephariah Slick, Justice of the Peace, and Deacon of the church over to Weathersfield in the state of ConnecticutStephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
General
High Life in New York: A series of letters to Mr. Zephariah Slick, Justice of the Peace, and Deacon of the church over to Weathersfield in the state of Connecticut
Stephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
Think sez I, is this the swarry that Cousin Beebe has bought to show his
company: I reckon he'd better have bought a calico frock or something of
that sort to kiver over it. I couldn't bear to look at it, and so I jest
turned about and stood still by the winder with my eyes wide open, for
at the t'other eend of the room was another garden with a naked swarry
and bushes in it, as much like the one I'd been a looking in as could
be. I went toward it, but stopped short, and burst out a larfin all by
myself, for it was nothing but the same garden a shining in the great
big looking glass, that I wrote to you about, that hung up right afore
me.
[Illustration: "Think, says I, is this the swarry that Cousin Beebe has
bought to show his company: I reckon he'd better have bought a calico
frock or something of that sort to kiver over it."--_Page 56._]
Arter I'd stole another sly look at the orange tree and the swarry, I
jest stuck my hands in my pockets as well as I could, considering they
were so tight, and stickin out one foot, leaned back again the winder
frame and looked around the room. A hot sweltering sun in dog days could
not have been brighter than everything was. There were two great things
hung by chains from the middle of both rooms, with hundreds and hundreds
of chunks of glass a hanging all over them; and they were stuck full of
candles as white as curd, all a burning and blazing, till they looked
like a heap of ice and snow hung up to melt in a fire. Both the mantle
shelfs were kivered over with them things that I told you about that
looked so much like gold; some on 'em were lamps, and some had great
white candles stuck into them; and there were lots on lots of flowers
set in among them that smelt as sweet as new hay, and such a shining
and glistening I never did see. The best on it all was, that the
whopping looking glasses on both eends the rooms made them seem twice as
long, and as if they had a great many more things in them than they raly
had. There were two round tables made out of some kind of cloudy stun,
about as large as marm's cherry-wood tea-table, a standing at both eends
of the rooms, all kivered over with leetle picters and all sorts of
play-things, besides heaps of books with morocco backs and sprigged off
with gold, all lying among them every which way, as if somebody had been
in a hurry, and had pitched them on the tables without staying to pile
them up.
Besides all that, they had brought in a whole heap more of them
footstools that I told you about, and they had put square kind of back
pillows all tossled off and kivered over with flowers at the eends of
the two settees, besides a good many other things that I haint time to
write about. "Wal," sez I to myself, "if Cousin Beebe don't take the
shine off these New Yorkers in his party I lose my guess; but I wonder
where on arth he contrives to raise money to do it with these hard
times, for all this must have cost him a few, I'm sartin."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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