Ginger-Snaps

I have also dim recollections of "seating" a pair of trousers, to see if I had any undeveloped talent in that line; but I have a lurking suspicion that I must have interfered with their original shape, for though my efforts received due commendation, I am confident those breeches were never worn afterward. But I think my failure came of my always running away, in my girlhood, whenever the family tailoress came to reside with us for a period, to make innumerable vests, jackets, etc., for my little brothers. In revenge she prophesied that, when I was married, I should have always boys, and be very glad of her presence. When she learned years after, that I had three girls, she remarked, in a limp and crestfallen state, that "it beat all I should have my own way in such a matter as that!"

Oh, yes, I suppose there is something to be got out of the world besides dolls and sugar-candy; but whether it is worth while to go through all we do to secure it, remains yet the unsolved problem.

Grown people, doubtless, have their crucifixions. Women, I know, "die daily." But I am certain, from observation and reflection, that some children, and very small ones too, suffer quite as much as it is possible for adults to do. I shall never forget a punishment measured out to me, when a fat little chub at school. I had committed the heinous offence of "whispering to one of the boys." I don't recollect what it was about. I only remember that Georgie smiled kindly at me on that first terrible day when I took my seat on a narrow bench, without any back, to "keep very still;" which was then, and is now, the most fiendish torment that can be devised for me.

Directly my name was called to "stand up in the middle of the floor." His name, "Georgie," was also called. With very red faces, out of which all the smile had gone, we confronted each other. Miss Birch then turned us back to back, and with a string of twine tied our elbows together, saying to me as she did so, "Since you like boys, you shall have enough of 'em." Now Georgie, true to the instincts of his sex, no sooner felt himself "bound" to the little creature, whom he the moment before adored, than he began to pull at the cruel string, till it cut into my fat bare arm, with torturing sharpness; his jacket sleeve protecting him from the pain he inflicted on me. There we stood, "the boys" laughing at Georgie. What little man could stand being "hen-pecked," even at that tender age? For me, I would not have shed a tear, had he cut my arm in two. I let him pull and tweak, and bore it with Spartan endurance till our penance was over, and school was "let out."

"Did you care?" asked the girls of me, going home. "No," answered I, huskily, with my chin in the air, twitching nervously at my white pinafore. I said nothing about it when I got home, but went up garret to cry it out. That Georgie should have hurt me on purpose, when I was in disgrace! That he should not have walked home with me from school, as before; or that he – a boy– should be "afraid," though a thousand of "the boys" looked on, to speak to a girl – to speak to me! His reign was over from that moment, spite of his curly black hair and glittering white teeth. I staid up garret till I had it all out among the rafters, and then washed my face and went down to my dinner.

The next morning I took my satchel and went to school. When I got as far as the corner of the street, Georgie was there waiting for me. I didn't see him. I looked straight at the lamp-post. He said softly, "Sarah!" I didn't hear. I planted my little boots firmly on the sidewalk and trotted on. He had not been my friend in my trouble. Failing in that, he had failed in everything. This was my first life-battle. I have had others since, with greater capacity for suffering; but I thought then, nothing could be worse than little Georgie's defection.

One day I was walking, with my two little girls beside me, and met "Georgie," to whom I had never spoken since our childish falling out. He was a physician then, in good practice, and as handsome as a man, as he had been as a child.

We each laughed, and passed on. For one, I was glad that I was not "tied" to him, save only for those few moments.

I may add, however, by way of postscript, that if Miss Birch imagined that she then and there cured me of "whispering to the boys," it was a fallacy.

Have you a habit of "putting off till a better time" – through an indolence inexplicable even to yourself – little matters that may seem trifling, but which you should really consider as tests of character? To such we say, fight this inclination with a persistent strength which will take no denial, if you ever wish to be or to accomplish anything in this world; for rest assured, it is the little fox at the foot of the vine, which will nibble away till every bud and blossom of the future shall be covered with mildew and blight.

VARIETIES OF HUMAN NATURE

SHOW me an "easy person," and I will show you a selfish one. Good-natured he may be; why not? since the disastrous consequences of his "easiness" are generally shouldered by other people. He always "guesses it is all right," though he knows it is all wrong. None so blind as they who don't wish to see. To right an abuse, is to tread on somebody's corns, and then that Somebody might turn and tread on his. For instance, some boys in the street are pelting a poor, drunken woman. "Well – boys will do such things." He takes a journey with his family and stops at a hotel in the dog-days, and the hotel clerk assigns him a room which is right over a fiery kitchen. He "guesses" there was no other to give; if so, why didn't the clerk say so? That might possibly do if the clerk didn't always give him the room over the hotel kitchen. He gets up from his seat in the car to step out upon the platform; a very odorous individual takes his seat, much to the disgust of his family. When asked to eject him, he replies, that he is not sure that the law in such cases is in his own favor; so he takes another seat, and leaves to them the new and uncongenial neighbor. The grocer sends him bad butter, instead of the good for which he bargained; but he thinks it was the grocer's boy who did it, and that he didn't do it purposely, and that he wont do it again. The milkman overcharges in his bill: well, very likely grass was scarce, or there was some good reason for it; beside, he can give his family a dollar or two less, the next time money is wanted, – and it is always wanted, – and that will make it all square; thus proving the adage, "that nobody can be generous without doing an injustice to somebody." Mr. Easy orders a coat; and when it comes home the sleeves are too short; but he don't like to send it back. He guesses the cutter understood the order to be just so; besides it is paid for and settled. Mr. Easy always pays for things before they come home; – he thinks it looks like distrust of your fellow-creatures if you don't; – and so he has perpetual short sleeves in his coats, and perpetually his trousers come home too long in the leg; and his wife has to keep on fibbing, and tell him they are just right, and it is the latest fashion; for fear he will ask her, as she goes by the tailor's store, just to step in and mention it, because she is so good at such things, you know, and don't mind speaking up; which accomplishment, desirable as it is, he prefers her to exercise outside the house; in-doors it must be kept in pickle.

The cook sends up the meat underdone. Mr. Easy remarks, apologetically, that it was a larger piece than usual; as if just there, the cook's judgment, if she had any, was not expected to come in, by putting it on to roast a little earlier, else what is the use of a cook?

Now, Mr. Easy's wife believes in eternal justice – obedience or the guillotine. She thinks that the person who, through indolence, offers a premium for carelessness or incompetency, commits a crime against society. She believes that he has no right to shirk a disagreeable duty because it is disagreeable; or because he is lazy, or because it is pleasant to be popular, and to appear amiable to the outside world. She believes that executive people are the hinges upon which alone the world turns – creaking awfully sometimes, it is true, but, thank God! turning! not rusting. She believes in using the dictionary, and plenty of it, when people need waking up to their duty; and, this accomplished, she believes in laying it on the shelf till again called for. A wrong un-righted pains Mrs. Easy; rouses her fiery indignation. Mr. Easy is never quite sure it is wrong; and, till he is, it is not necessary, in his opinion, to clear the deck for action.

Now, I have no doubt that both styles of persons have their mission in the world, else they wouldn't be here: I have known wasps and snails each to have their admirers. Some day I'll write a book of fables for you, to which Æsop's shall be no circumstance.

I wonder is a man justified, to his own conscience or his Maker, in allowing himself to be so absorbed by "business," beyond what is necessary to the comfortable support of his family, that he is as much a stranger to his own wife and children as if he were only a boarder in the family, – bodily present indeed at two or three meals a day, but totally ignorant of the ponderosity of the domestic machinery, or at what cost of health, or mental and moral deterioration, to his wife, this unrelieved strain is being carried out from day to day.

Perhaps you will answer, Who is to decide what is "a necessary and comfortable support for a family"? I can only ask, if there is not a great wrong unredressed, when a man knows nothing of the different mental or moral characteristics of the children he has launched into a world of temptation and trial, and is also quite content to remain ignorant. I think all intelligent, thinking persons will agree on this point. Also when a man, professional or other, seldom or never addresses a word to his wife about anything but the family expenses, or his favorite mode of cooking any pet article of food. Sure I am that any wife who is not a hopeless idiot, will chafe under such treatment, until, at last, her fate being too much for her, mental and moral deterioration fairly set in, and she hopelessly revolves in her narrow bounds without even a desire that the children, once so dear to her, should ever peep over and beyond them. The friends whom she might and ought to have retained for herself and them, she has gradually, one by one, lost sight of; her husband being never at home to care whether they came or stayed away – his interests, and his friends, being quite separate and apart. Meantime his house shines, his meals are well prepared, and his "buttons" are in place.

This picture is not overdrawn. I can produce you its counterparts any hour in the twenty-four. By and by, the oldest boy outgrows pinafores and jackets, and steps round in long-tails. No father has been at hand, to point out the quicksands he should have avoided, or to encourage him by his sympathy or love to do right. But the devil in all his Protean shapes has been at his elbow, delighted at that father's indifference. Presently some wild oat sown, brings to that home, as yet publicly undisgraced, its full-grown harvest of shame. Now come storms of reproach, under which the loving mother weeps and cowers, as if she, God help her! were guilty. Alas! and alas! were such young wayward feet ever turned right by such injudiciousness and injustice? Does not that boy know that it is the disgrace alone that father feels, and not the shipwreck of his child's soul? Does that father say, even to himself, "Oh, Absalom! my son! my son!" Not at all: he feels only a blind rage, a vexatious thwarting and hindering of his own affairs, which his son has brought about.

"His son?"

It is about the first time he ever regarded him in that relationship.

There is another kind of father and husband, quite the antipodes of this. He devotes himself entirely to the domestic side of the question. He has no "business" to occupy him, nor does he desire to have. He loves his wife devotedly, and the more children he has the better he is pleased. Their mother and themselves are enveloped in a warm atmosphere of love. Never was a harsh, pettish, or fretful word heard from his amiable lips. He plays with the children all day; he fixes kites and balls without stint for them; he tends the baby; and when a crisis comes, and the maid-of-all-work disappears, discouraged at the eleventh baby, he washes the dishes, if need be, as serenely as if he were born to it. Meantime these really bright children, loving and loved, grow apace. The mother is growing old. Love is a good thing, but there is a far-off questioning look in her gentle eyes, vainly searching those children's future. Her hands are now helplessly tied, and she sees no outward tendency toward business in his. She "loves him" – how can she help it? —thus far; but the years move on so quickly, and her children grow so tall! She remembers sadly the advantages of education she had, as she looks into the fair faces of her girls. Ah! how long will she continue to "love" their father? And how will those children, in after years, gauge that "love" which placed such obstacles between them and their best advancement? At what point in their young lives will they, chafing, let go the irresolute hand, that could only lead them up and down that narrow garden-path, when the broad highway of development lay in sight, and untrodden?

I am fully persuaded that if even I had created human beings, I couldn't have improved upon the original programme. I used to think that I should like to sweep the whole pussy-cat tribe of my fellow-creatures out of existence, with one wave of my wand. I am convinced now, that as a means of grace, they had better remain. Their sublime indifference as to the period in which the most momentous questions are to be settled, is instructive to hurricane natures. The fatalistic way in which they subside into their own comfortable chimney-corner, while all the moral elements are in a wild tornado outside, is calming to the spirit. The placidity with which they can eat, and sleep, and drink, and be merry, side by side with the corpses of dead hopes and abortive projects, over which humanity stands weeping and wringing her hands, is as good as a dose of opium. We look at them, and, wiping the cold perspiration from our brow, we ask, Is it possible, then, that we have been lashing ourselves into all this fury, when there is really to be no shipwreck? Are we really on the high road to lunacy without knowing it, and in the near proximity to such sublime self-poise and calmness? We slink into our corner to reflect; and get that much breathing-time and wind to go at the demon again. So you see they are of use, as I told you.

Then there are your critical people, like John Randolph, who actually stopped his dying, to correct the pronunciation of a friend who was waiting to close his eyes. So they will stop you in the midst of a ravishing bit of poetry, or the narration of a story, to dissect the sentiment of it by some glaring Drummond light, that they keep remorselessly on hand for such purposes, while you, poor wretch, dropped suddenly from your sublime height, lose both your place and your temper.

Now you can't say this isn't educational.

Then there is your human chameleon, who takes its color from the last leaf it feeds on. You quote one of its yesterday-expressed opinions, with full assurance of faith, as exactly coinciding with your own. Up comes a third party, and demands how you can so misrepresent the chameleon's views, because that very day it expressed a totally different opinion to this third party. You ask the chameleon for an explanation; when it coolly informs you that consistency is the vice of little minds; and that to unsay to-day what you said yesterday, is a proof of progress. You retire with a muttered wish that the chameleon would furnish you with a pair of seven-league boots, with which to overtake his "progress."

Then there is that social wasp, "I told you so;" who, vulture-like, hovers over the fallen, ready to insert his cruel beak at any sore place one has made, tripping. The guillotine is nothing to the bits of quivering flesh he tears out.

Then there is your routine person, who sneezes precisely at six, and sits down precisely at seven, and rises precisely at eight, and looks out of the window precisely at nine, and keeps this up month after month, and year after year, without the shadow of turning, and in the teeth of imperative exigencies, and with a stony stoicism, and pettiness of purpose, which is exasperating enough to bring on a fit of apoplexy in the beholder.

Nobody can say that this is not equal to any authorized penance in the church, to the sufferer, whose blood has not turned to milk and water. In fact, I have often wondered why our Roman Catholic friends, who have so many excellencies, need trouble themselves to suggest or appoint anything of the kind, when life is so full of crosses and discipline in the raw. When it is so teeming with cross-purposes, that every person you meet seems obstinately bent either upon forming a partnership which, like oil and water, will forever be opposed to mingling, or throwing pebble after pebble into some ocean, expecting that the little circle it makes, will reach to the farthest shore of worldly fame or ambition. In fact, when I have visited lunatic asylums, it has really seemed to me that mad as their inmates undoubtedly are, there is little need to dissever them from their comrades on the outside.

You will perceive from this that I consider life a discipline. I do. No response was ever heartier. When one bubble after another bursts, this, you see, is a comforting reflection to settle down upon. There was once a man who read the lists of deaths every day, hoping to see that of some woman, the whole sisterhood of whom he hated. When he came to one, he always exclaimed, "Thank God, there's another of 'em gone!" My moral is obvious.

Commend me to the person who can say No with a will, when it is needed; who is not deterred from it for fear of being called "disagreeable," or "being thought to be always in hot water." Any water but lukewarm water for me! One of my favorite passages in the Good Book is this: "I would that thou wert either cold or hot; but because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." The joke comes in here: that your timid conservative is always the first to raise the signal of distress on any emergency for the speedy arrival of "that disagreeable person who is always in hot water." He likes him marvellously as such crises of his existence? Now, beyond dispute, everybody likes to travel on a smooth-beaten road without jolting, if possible; but in order for this, somebody must make a great turn-over generally, in clearing away the stones that obstruct it. Now, I consider it a cowardly piece of business for either man or woman, to travel miles around that road, rather than take hold and do their fair share of the disagreeable work, either from indolence, or from fear that they might offend one who might possibly prefer that the road should remain in its normal condition. Oh, how glad they are when somebody else has taken this troublesome pioneership off their shoulders! How they rub their lazy hands, and smirk, and say, "You see you do these things so well! I never was constituted for it"! Which translated, means, that they prefer sacrificing a principle to sacrificing their ease or popularity; as if anybody liked to keep all the time fighting – as if other people didn't love ease too!

"A GOOD MISTRESS ALWAYS MAKES A GOOD SERVANT."

NOW I beg leave to place a very sizable interrogation-point just here; at any rate, until I receive an intelligible definition of "a good mistress." A servant's definition of one, in these days, is, "A lady who never comes down-stairs, poking her nose into things;" one who never is so "mean" as to calculate the time that elapses since the last batch of tea, coffee, sugar, or flour was bought, and the possibility, when these stores run short of their proper limit, that they have not been applied wholly to the use of the family. "A good mistress," to their idea, is one who is totally oblivious as to the time the gas is turned off at night, in the lower part of the house, or whether, indeed, it is turned off at all, or how many superfluous burners are constantly swelling up the gas-bill, where one would answer the purpose. "A good mistress," in servants' parlance, is one who scorns to look after any amount of chicken, or turkey, or beef, which may not be all eaten the first time it is set upon the table, and who will cheerfully purchase steaks for breakfast instead. "A good mistress," with many of them, is one who, beside paying good wages, gives them half-worn clothes enough to enable them to spend their money in other directions, and who yet is willing that these clothes should be worn only when they go out visiting, while they are constantly untidy at work.

"A good mistress," with the master of the house, is one who is just the reverse of all this. She is one who is constantly fighting waste and unnecessary outlay, and stupidity, and ignorance, and obstinacy, and impertinence, and unthrift. She is one who, with a constant panorama of Bridgets, and Betseys, and Marys, and Sallys, through her lower domains, at the expense of her own strength, and patience, and temper, and brain, and with no prospect of an end to the same until intelligence-offices contain more intelligence, is yet perfectly seraphic at the idea of being at the head of a training-school for servants, the remainder of her natural life; and smiles constantly at the same time under reminders of the necessity of greater economy in the household department. This is the husband's idea of "a good mistress."

Now I maintain that, with the present average material, ever so good a mistress, with the best intelligence and intentions, cannot "make a good servant." Passable they may be; but not "good."

The truth is —brain is wanted to make a good servant; and at present there is only muscle. Hence our gas is half turned off. Hence our water is wholly turned on, till a flood comes. Hence bits of stick and string and dirt are thrown into pipes – for the benefit of the plumber, and the depletion of our pockets. Hence the devil is to pay generally, till the distracted good lady of the house considers it the last drop in the bucket, when "her Sam" or John is unreasonable enough to expect her, with such brainless material, to present him with workmanlike results.

In America, the word "servant" is hateful to them; they much prefer the word "domestic" to express the same idea. Every servant in America, with few exceptions, dresses to suit herself; and a very bad thing she generally makes of it. Some few families insist on the muslin cap for their "nurses," and the regulation black dress and white apron. But this dress is obnoxious to the majority of servants; nor do I, for one, blame them for it. A most excellent colored woman, in a family of my acquaintance, whose Northern mistress had purchased her freedom before the war, and who was beloved by every member of the family, refused to wear the colored turban-handkerchief at request of her mistress, who had a taste for the picturesque in costume, saying, with much spirit, "I cannot do it, madam, – not even for you; – it is hateful to me; it is the badge of the servitude I suffered so much under." Of course, she was excused.

Now I can understand why so few servants, in this country, white or black, are willing to wear anything that bears the interpretation of "a livery." At the same time, there is hardly a housekeeper or mistress in the land who is not annoyed by the big hoop, and the long dress, which knocks over articles, and catches in doors, and trips up the unlucky wearer in doing her housework, or waiting on table.

Of course, if she understood managing her crinoline as she moved about, as does her "mistress," these things might not happen; but she does not; and it is the biggest and stiffest that she can find that she generally prefers and wears. This is unfortunate for another reason; because it often exposes dilapidated and soiled underclothing, and a very questionable state of shoe and stocking. That her mistress, though cleanly, often dresses in questionable taste, both as regards the adaptability of her dress to the state of her husband's purse, and the artistic selection of colors, does not make these glaring mistakes of her servants less palpable, or less injurious to the servant's morality; for where the passion for show, joined to narrow means, effaces that of decency and cleanliness, the downward road to ruin, for a woman in any station, is already entered upon. It needs only a very slight impetus to determine the final result.