Phemie Frost's ExperiencesStephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
General
Phemie Frost's Experiences
Stephens, Ann S. (Ann Sophia)
Fiction
Dear sisters:--You haven't the least idea of what warm weather is in
Vermont. Why, if one of your mountain trout streams could have run
through New York, it would have boiled over and cooked the poor little
speckled creatures that live in its waves. You never saw anything like
it in your born days. The sea breezes at Long Branch seemed to come over
an ocean of melted lead, blasted up by some old furnace of a volcano.
For one whole week I was just dying of envy, when I thought of the pigs
roving loose in our village, with such lovely mud puddles to lie down
in, without caring a sumarke whether their clothes were mussed--excuse
that word, I got it here in York--or not.
While I was panting for breath on the sea-shore, I could think of them,
with home-sick longing, up to their throats in the soft, mushy fluid of
a delicious puddle, with swarms of yellow butterflies rising, floating,
and settling around them, as if a bed of primroses had got tired of
growing in one place, and had burst off on a grand spree through the
air, settling down for a drink now and then.
Yes, sisters, I was brought, in the hot blast of those summer days, to a
state of unchristian envy, and would have been glad to swap places with
flounders, or have slept in some cellar, with a block of ice for a
pillow.
But nothing that I ever saw lasts for ever, or if it does I haven't
lived long enough to prove it. Still, one gets restless in weather like
this, when human beings are dropping down dead in the streets of a city
close by in dozens, from sunstrokes.
This morning I sat in my room, with a short gown and not over many
skirts on, looking through the green slats of my door, and watching the
sunshine shimmer down on the waves where the little white vessels were
folding their sails, and going to sleep like birds too lazy for flying,
when a colored person came to my door, and says he:
"Mr. Burke's compliments, and will Miss Frost take a walk with him on
the beach?"
I started up, and, says I:
"Won't I!" Then I composed myself, and sent back compliments, and Miss
Frost will have great pleasure in complying with Mr. Burke's polite
invitation.
When the--colored messenger was gone, I sat down in the Boston rocker,
clasped my hands, and drew a deep, deep sigh of ecstatic expectation.
Then I remembered that he was waiting, and sprang to my feet.
With my two shaking hands I fastened the other woman's hair over my own,
that would neither curl nor friz worth a cent that awful hot day. Then I
put on a white muslin dress, that looked seraphically innocent, and
tightened it up with a plaid silk sash, that circled my slender waist
and floated off like a rainbow breaking through a cloud.
Then I took my parasol in one hand, held my flowing skirts up with the
other, and went forth to meet my destiny. Oh, how my feet longed to
dance! How my girlish heart beat and fluttered in this innocent bosom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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