The Works of Thomas Hood; Vol. 01 (of 11): Comic and Serious, in Prose and Verse, With All the Original IllustrationsHood, Thomas
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The Works of Thomas Hood; Vol. 01 (of 11): Comic and Serious, in Prose and Verse, With All the Original Illustrations
Hood, Thomas
English poetry -- 19th century; English wit and humor; Humorous poetry, English
You who know my pastoral aspirings, and have been the indulgent
confidant of my votive tributes to the Muses, will conceive the refined
nature of my enjoyment when I mention the intellectual repast of this
morning. I never could enjoy Bloomfield in Barbican,--but to-day he
read beautifully under our pear-tree. I look forward to the felicity of
reading Thomson’s Summer with you on the green seat, and if engagements
at Christmas permit your participation in the bard, there is a bower of
evergreens that will be delightful for the perusal of his Winter.
I enclose, by request, an epistolary effusion from sister Dorothy,
which I know will provoke your risible powers, by the domesticity of
its details. You know she was always in the homely characteristics a
perfect Cinderella, though I doubt whether even supernatural agency
could adapt her foot to a diminutive vitrified slipper, or her hand
for a prince of regal primogeniture. But I am summoned to receive,
with family members, the felicitations of Lincolnshire aristocracy;
though whatever necessary distinctions may prospectively occur between
respective grades in life, they will only superficially affect the
sentiments of eternal friendship between my dear Jemima and her
affectionate friend,
ANASTASIA PUGSLEY.
No. IV.--_From Miss_ DOROTHY PUGSLEY _to the Same_.
MY DEAR MISS JEMIMA,
Providence having been pleased to remove my domestic duties from
Barbican to Lincolnshire, I trust I shall have strength of constitution
to fulfil them as becomes my new allotted line of life. As we are
not sent into this world to be idle, and Anastasia has declined
housewifery, I have undertaken the Dairy, and the Brewery, and the
Baking, and the Poultry, the Pigs and the Pastry,--and though I feel
fatigued at first, use reconciles to labours and trials, more severe
than I at present enjoy. Altho’ things may not turn out to wish at
present, yet all well-directed efforts are sure to meet reward in the
end, and altho’ I have chumped and churned two days running, and it’s
nothing yet but curds and whey, I should be wrong to despair of eating
butter of my own making before I die. Considering the adulteration
committed by every article in London, I was never happier in any
prospect, than of drinking my own milk, fattening my own calves, and
laying my own eggs. We cackle so much I am sure we new-lay somewhere,
tho’ I cannot find out our nests; and I am looking every day to have
chickens, as one pepper-and-salt-coloured hen has been setting these
two months. When a poor ignorant bird sets me such an example of
patience, how can I repine at the hardest domestic drudgery! Mother
and I have worked like horses to be sure, ever since we came to the
estate; but if we die in it, we know it’s for the good of the family,
and to agreeably surprise my Father, who is still in town winding
up his books. For my own part, if it was right to look at things so
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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