Excerpt
THE ALMS-HOUSE.
For the purpose of preventing an inconvenient rush of literary tuft-hunters and sight-seers thither next summer, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the town of the Ritualistic church. Let it stand in these pages as Bumsteadville. Possibly it was not known to the Romans, the Saxons, nor the Normans by that name, if by any name at all; but a name more or less weird and full of damp syllables can be of little moment to a place not owned by any advertising Suburban-Residence benefactors.
A disagreeable and healthy suburb, Bumsteadville, with a strange odor of dried bones from its ancient pauper burial-ground, and many quaint old ruins in the shapes of elderly men engaged as contributors to the monthly magazines of the day. Antiquity pervades Bumsteadville; nothing is new; the very Rye is old; also the Jamaica, Santa Cruz, and a number of the native maids. A drowsy place, with all its changes lying far behind it; or, at least, the sun-browned mendicants passing through say they never saw a place offering so little present change.
In the midst of Bumsteadville stands the Alms-House; a building of an antic order of architecture; still known by its original title to the paynobility and indigentry of the surrounding country, several of whose ancestors abode there in the days before voting was a certain livelihood; although now bearing a door-plate inscribed, "Macassar Female College, Miss CAROWTHERS." Whether any of the country editors, projectors of American Comic papers, and other inmates of the edifice in times of yore, ever come back in spirit to be astonished by the manner in which modern serious and humorous print can be made productive of anything but penury by publishing True Stories of Lord BYRON and the autobiographies of detached wives, maybe of interest to philosophers, but is of no account to Miss CAROWTHERS. Every day, during school-hours, does Miss CAROWTHERS, in spectacles and high-necked alpaca, preside over her Young Ladies of Fashion, with an austerity and elderliness before which every mental image of Man, even as the most poetical of abstractions, withers and dies. Every night, after the young ladies have retired, does Miss CAROWTHERS put on a freshening aspect, don a more youthful low-necked dress—
As though a rose Should leave its clothes And be a bud again,—
and become a sprightlier Miss CAROWTHERS. Every night, at the same hour, does Miss CAROWTHERS discuss with her First Assistant, Mrs. PILLSBURY, the Inalienable Bights of Women; always making certain casual reference to a gentleman in the dim past, whom she was obliged to sue for breach of promise, and to whom, for that reason, Miss CAROWTHERS airily refers, with a toleration bred of the lapse of time, as "Breachy Mr. BLODGETT."
The pet pupil of the Alms-House is FLORA POTTS, of course called the Flowerpot; for whom a husband has been chosen by the will and bequest of her departed papa, and at whom none of the other Macassar young ladies can look without wondering how it must feel....