A pleasant passage of sixty hours, a good shaking up at the hands of
that old tyrant, sea-sickness, and Lady Swiggs finds the steamer on
which she took passage gliding majestically up New York Bay. There she
sits, in all her dignity, an embodiment of our decayed chivalry, a fair
representative of our first families. She has taken up her position on
the upper deck, in front of the wheel house. As one after another the
objects of beauty that make grand the environs of that noble Bay, open
to her astonished eyes, she contrasts them favorably or unfavorably
with some familiar object in Charleston harbor. There is indeed a
similarity in the conformation. And though ours, she says, may not be
so extensive, nor so grand in its outlines, nor so calm and soft in its
perspective, there is a more aristocratic air about it. Smaller bodies
are always more select and respectable. The captain, to whom she has
put an hundred and one questions which he answers in monosyllables, is
not, she thinks, so much of a gentleman as he might have been had he
been educated in Charleston. He makes no distinction in favor of people
of rank.
Lady Swiggs wears that same faded silk dress; her black crape bonnet,
with two saucy red artificial flowers tucked in at the side, sits so
jauntily; that dash of brown hair is smoothed so exactly over her
yellow, shrivelled forehead; her lower jaw oscillates with increased
motion; and her sharp, gray eyes, as before, peer anxiously through her
great-eyed spectacles. And, generous reader, that you may not mistake
her, she has brought her inseparable Milton, which she holds firmly
grasped in her right hand. “You have had a tedious time of it, Madam,”
says a corpulent lady, who is extensively dressed and jewelled, and
accosts her with a familiar air. Lady Swiggs says not so tedious as it
might have been, and gives her head two or three very fashionable
twitches.
“Your name, if you please?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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