The Fortunes of Oliver HornSmith, Francis Hopkinson
General
The Fortunes of Oliver Horn
Smith, Francis Hopkinson
Baltimore (Md.) -- Fiction; Bildungsromans; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Painters -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
The two Misses Teetum sat one at either end--Miss Ann, thin, severe,
precise; Miss Sarah, stout, coy, and a trifle kittenish, as doubtless
became a young woman of forty-seven, and her sister's junior by eight
years. Miss Ann had evidently passed the dead-line of middle age, and
had given up the fight, and was fast becoming a very prim and very
proper old lady, but Miss Sarah, being out of range, could still smile,
and nod her head, and shake her curls, and laugh little, hollow,
girlish laughs, and otherwise disport herself in a light and kittenish
way, after the manner of her day and age. All of which betrayed not
only her earnest desire to please, but her increasing anxiety to get in
under matrimonial cover before one of Father Time's sharpshooters
picked her off, and thus ended her youthful career.
The guests seated on either side of these two presiding goddesses,
Oliver was convinced, as he studied the double row of faces, would have
stretched the wondering eyelids of Kennedy Square to their utmost
limits.
Old Mr. Lang, who with his invalid wife occupied the room immediately
below Fred's, and who had been so nearly drowned out the night before
because of McFudd's acrobatic tendencies, sat on Fred's left. Properly
clothed and in his right mind, he proved to be a most delightful old
gentleman, with gold spectacles and snow-white side-whiskers, and a
welcoming smile for everyone who entered. Fred said that the smile
never wavered even when the old gentleman had been up all night with
his wife.
Across the table, with her eye-glasses trained on Oliver, half
concealed by a huge china "compoteer" (to quote the waitress), and at
present filled with last week's fruit, caulked with almonds, sat Mrs.
Southwark Boggs--sole surviving relic of S. B., Esq. This misfortune
she celebrated by wearing his daguerreotype, set in plain gold, as a
brooch with which she fastened her crocheted collar. She was a thin,
faded, funereal-looking person, her body encased in a black silk dress,
which looked as if it had been pressed and ironed over night, and her
hands in black silk mitts which reached to her knuckles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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