Caper-Sauce: A Volume of Chit-Chat about Men, Women, and Things.. Fern Fanny

there. Your neighbor, Tom Snooks, is smoking at his window, and puffing it right through yours over your lovely roses, the perfume of which he quite extinguishes with his nasty odor.

      Heavens! And this is "Spring!" "Budding Spring!" The poets make no mention of these little things in their "Odes!"

      Well – at least, you say to yourself, there will be peace and heavenly quiet with the stars at midnight, by the open window. I will be patient till then.

      Is there?

      What is that? A policeman's loud rap-rap on the pavement for assistance to capture a burglar. Next a woman's scream; the brute who just accosted the poor wretch has struck her a heavy blow upon the temple. And now reels past a drunken man, zigzagging down the street, with a little whimpering boy by one hand, old enough to know what a "Station-house" means, and trembling lest "father" should be taken there.

      You throw yourself upon your bed, weary and sick at heart. Even the stars seem to glow with a red, unnatural light, as if they too were worn with watching the wrongs and frets they nightly look down upon.

      "Balmy night." What liars poets can be!

      A PEEP AT BOSTON

      Boston is a lovely place to be baptized in, and to go back to. My old love, "Boston Common" – that good, old-fashioned, unspoiled, unmodernized name – looks more lovely this summer than I ever remember to have seen it. New York may well take a lesson from its order and neatness, with regard to our ill-kept city parks. I sat there, under those lovely trees which used to wave over my school-girl head; and had it not been for the little bright-eyed grandchild beside me picking buttercups, I might have fancied it was Saturday afternoon, and no school, and that I was to be back to my mother's apronstrings "by sundown, without fail." I know I could not have enjoyed even then the birds' song, or the sparkling pond, or the big trees more than at that moment. Out of my dream-land, whither they had led me, I was awakened by a jump into my lap, and the question, "And did you really play with buttercups here, when you were a little girl?" It was a long bridge that question led me over, so long that I forgot to answer till the question was repeated. I had to stop, and outgrow buttercups, and hold again by my matronly hand a little creature, the counterpart of my questioner, who long since closed her eyes forever, in this world, upon us both! It took time, you see, before I could say, "Yes, dear; it was just in this very lovely spot that both your mother and I picked buttercups when children, on the bright Saturday afternoons of long ago; and six years and a half of your little life I have waited, to see you run down those sloping paths, and to show you the 'Frog-Pond,' and to tell you to look up into the branches that nearly touch the sky; and now here we are! But there were no 'deer' feeding on this Common when I was a little girl, but instead cows to whom I gave plenty of room to pass as I went along; and instead of that gay little hat, with mimic grasses and daisies, such as I have put upon your head, my mother tied under my chin a little sun-bonnet. And she didn't run to me if I sneezed, as I do to you, for I had a heap of brothers and sisters, and we had to take care of our own sneezing; but I know I had twenty-five cents to spend on Fourth of July; and I know that, if any little girl's belt in Boston was ever tightened by roast turkey and pie more than mine was on 'Thanksgiving day,' I pity her! I wonder what has become of all the little children I used to play with here? We used to go up to the tip-top of that State House, I know; but I don't care to try it now. Not that it would tire me – of course not; but I've seen all that can be seen from that dome, and a little farther too."

      Oh, the peace and loveliness of sweet "Mount Auburn!" The new graves since I was there, and the old graves now moss-grown that I remember so well! I, too, shall sleep sweetly there some day; but the hardest pang I shall know, between now and then, will be letting go the little hand that clasped mine to-day, as I walked about there. And yet there were little graves all around us. He knows best!

      In Boston I saw the remains of "The Jubilee." I was asked, "Did I hear and see the Jubilee?" I was supposed, as coming from New York, to grieve at the success of "The Jubilee;" and being an adopted New Yorker, to feel like skulking round the back streets in Boston, covered with confusion that Manhattan had no "Jubilee." Lord bless you! I love every bean that was ever baked in Boston; every cod-fish-ball ever fried; and every brown-bread loaf ever baked there. I know too, as well as any Bostonian, that —

      "Zaccheus he

      Did climb the tree,

      His Lord and Master

      For to see;"

      and I made a courtesy to the ground, when I came in sight of "Park-street" steeple, and "Faneuil Hall!" so don't be pitching into me. Hit some other fellow who isn't "up" in the Assembly's catechism, and "total depravity," and brown bread. "Jubilee" as much as you want to; the world is a big place. "Holler" away!

      New England, all hail to thy peerless thrift! Thou art cranky and crotchety; thou art "sot," uncommon "sot," in thy ways, owing doubtless to the amiable sediment of English blood in thy veins. Thou wilt not be cheated in a bargain, even by thy best friend; but, in the meantime, that enableth thy large heart to give handsomely when charity knocks at thy door. Thy pronunciation may be peculiar, but, in the meantime, what thou dost not know, and cannot do, is rarely worth knowing or doing. Thou never hast marble, and silver, and plate glass, and statuary, in thy show-parlors, and shabby belongings where the world does not penetrate. Thou hast not stuccoed walls, with big cracks in them, or anything in thy domiciles, hanging as it were by the eyelids. Every nail is driven so that it will stay; every hinge hung so that it will work thoroughly. Every bolt and key and lock perform their duty like a martinet, so long as a piece of them endures. If thou hast a garden, be it only a square foot, it is made the most of with its "long saace" and "short saace" and "wimmin's notions," in the shape of flowers and caraway seed, to chew on Sunday, when the minister gets as far as "seventeenthly," and carnal nature will fondly recur to the waiting pot of baked beans in the kitchen oven. O! New England, here could I shed salt tears at the thought of thy baked beans, for Gotham knows them not. Alluding to that edible, I am met with a pitying sneer, accompanied with that dread word to snobs – "provincial!" It is ever thus, my peerless, with the envy which cannot attain to the perfection it derides. For you should see, my thrifty New England, the watery, white-livered, tasteless, swimmy, sticky poultice which Gotham christens "baked beans." My soul revolts at it. It is an unfeeling, wretched mockery of the rich, brown, crispy, succulent contents of that "platter" – yes, platter– I will say it! – which erst delighted my eyes in the days when I swallowed the Catechism without a question as to its infallibility. The flavor of the beans "haunts memory still;" but as to the Catechism, the world is progressing, and I am not one to put a drag on its wheels, believing that and it is best to let "natur" caper, especially as you can't help it; and after the dust it has kicked up has cleared away, we shall see what we shall see, be it wheat or chaff. Beside, the most conservative must admit, that though Noah's Ark was excellent for the flood, the "Great Eastern" is an improvement on it; and 'tisn't pretty, so they say who oftenest practise it! to stand with the Bible in your hand in 1862, and clamor for a private latch-key to heaven.

      Truth is sure

      And will endure,

      But I have wandered from my baked beans. I want some. Some New England baked beans. Some of "mother's beans." But, alas, mother's oven is fast disappearing. Mother's oven, where the beans stayed in all night, with the brown bread. Alas! it has given way to new-fangled "ranges," which "don't know beans." Excuse the vulgarity of the expression, but in such a cause I shan't stand for trifles. If you want rose-leaf sentimental-refinement, together with creamy patriotism, you may look in the columns of the Whip-Syllabub-Family-Visitor. This is a digression.

      When I started for a New England tour, it was my intention to get some of those beans; but the hotels there are getting so "genteel" with their paper-pantalettes on the roast-chicken's legs, and their paper frills on the roast-pigs'-tails, that I was convinced, that only at a genuine unsophisticated farm-house, where I could light down unannounced on Sarah-Jane – could this edible in its native and luscious beauty be found.

      Next summer, if "strategy" and the rebels don't chew us up, I start on a tour for those beans; nor am I to be imposed upon by any "genteel" substitutes or abortions