Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 20, August 13, 1870

Excerpt

FOR THE BEST.

Miss CAROWTHERS'S educational hotbed of female innocence was about to undergo desolation by the temporary dispersal of its intellectual buds and blossoms to their native soils, therefrom to fill home-atmospheres with the mental fragrance of "all the branches." Holiday Week drew near, when, as Miss CAROWTHERS Ritually expressed it, "all who were true believers of the American Church of England in their hearts would softly celebrate the devout Yearly Festival of Apostolic Christianity, by decking the Only True Church with symbolical evergreens over places where the paint was scratched off, and receiving New Year's Calls without intoxicating liquors." In honor of this approaching solemn season of peace on earth, good will to young men, the discipline of Macassar Female College was slightly relaxed: Bible-studies were no longer rigorously inflicted as a punishment for criminal absence of all punctuation from English Composition, and any Young Lady whose father was good pay could actually sneeze in her teacup without being locked into her own room on bread-and-water until she was truly penitent for her sin and wished she was a Christian. Consequently, an air of unusual license pervaded the Alms-House; woman's rights meetings were held at the heads of stairways to declare, that, whereas MARY AMANDA PARKINSON'S male second-cousin has promised to meet her at the railroad station, and thereby made her pretend to us that the letter was from her father, when all the time ANN LOUISA BAKER accidentally caught sight of the words "My Precious MOLLY" while looking for her scissors in the wrong drawer, and therefore, be it Resolved, that we wish he knew about one shoulder being a little higher than the other, (as she knows the dressmaker told her,) and about that one red whisker under the left hand corner of her chin which she might as well stop trying to keep cut off; dark assemblages resembling walking lobsters were convened in special dormitories at night, to compare brothers and tell how they Byronically said that they never should care for women again after what they had sacrificed for them in the horse-cars without so much as a "Thank you, sir," but if they ever could be brought to liking a girl now, it would be on account of her not pretending to care for anything but money and a husband's early grave; and very white parties of pleasure were organized in the halls, at ghostly hours, to go down to the cupboard for a mince-pie under pretense of hearing burglars, and subsequently to drink the mince-pie from curl-papers, accompanied by whispers of "H'sh! don't eat the crust so loud, or Miss CAROWTHERS 'll think it's a man."

In addition to these signs of impending freedom, trunks were packed in the rooms, with an adeptness of getting in things with springs twice as wide as any trunk, and of laying cologne-bottles, fans, and brushes, between objects with ruffles so as to perfectly protect the latter, that would have put the most conceited old bachelor to shame. Affected tenderly by thoughts of a separation which, so ridiculously uncertain is human life, might be forever, the young ladies who couldn't bear each other, and had been quite sorry for each other because she couldn't help it with such a natural disposition and rough forehead as hers, poor thing!—graciously made-up with each other, in case they should not meet again until in Heaven.—You will not think any more, HENRIETTA TOMLINSON, of what I told you about AUGUSTUS SMITH'S remarks to me that Sunday coming out of chapel....