“What’s that! what’s that!” flies from mouth to mouth; and forthwith they proceed to awaken their respective relations. “Mother! Aunt Hannah! do wake up; what is this awful noise?” “Oh, only a lock.” “Pray, be still,” groan out the sleepy members from below.
“A lock!” exclaim the vivacious creatures, ever on the alert for information; “and what is a lock, pray?”
“Don’t you know what a lock is, you silly creatures. Do lie down and go to sleep.”
“But say, there ain’t any danger in a lock, is there?” respond the querists. “Danger!” exclaims a deaf old lady, poking up her head. “What’s the matter? There hain’t nothing burst, has there?” “No, no, no!” exclaim the provoked and despairing opposition party, who find that there is no such thing as going to sleep till they have made the old lady below and the young ladies above understand exactly the philosophy of a lock. After a while the conversation again subsides; again all is still; you hear only the trampling of horses and the rippling of the rope in the water, and sleep again is stealing over you. You doze, you dream, and all of a sudden you are startled by a cry, “Chambermaid! wake up the lady that wants to be set ashore.” Up jumps chambermaid, and up jump the lady and two children, and forthwith form a committee of inquiry as to ways and means. “Where’s my bonnet?” says the lady, half awake and fumbling among the various articles of that name. “I thought I hung it up behind the door.” “Can’t you find it?” says the poor chambermaid, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “Oh, yes, here it is,” says the lady; and then the cloak, the shawl, the gloves, the shoes, receive each a separate discussion. At last all seems ready, and they begin to move off, when lo! Peter’s cap is missing. “Now, where can it be?” soliloquizes the lady. “I put it right here by the table-leg; maybe it got into some of the berths.” At this suggestion the chambermaid takes the candle, and goes round deliberately to every berth, poking the light directly in the face of every sleeper. “Here it is,” she exclaims, pulling at something black under one pillow. “No, indeed, those are my shoes,” says the vexed sleeper. “Maybe it’s here,” she resumes, darting upon something dark in another berth. “No, that’s my bag,” responds the occupant. The chambermaid then proceeds to turn over all the children on the floor, to see if it is not under them. In the course of which process they are most agreeably waked up and enlivened; and when everybody is broad awake, and most uncharitably wishing the cap, and Peter too, at the bottom of the canal, the good lady exclaims, “Well, if this isn’t lucky; here I had it safe in my basket all the time!” And she departed amid the—what shall I say? execrations!—of the whole company, ladies though they be.
Well, after this follows a hushing up and wiping up among the juvenile population, and a series of remarks commences from the various shelves of a very edifying and instructive tendency. One says that the woman did not seem to know where anything was; another says that she has waked them all up; a third adds that she has waked up all the children, too; and the elderly ladies make moral reflections on the importance of putting your things where you can find them—being always ready; which observations, being delivered in an exceedingly doleful and drowsy tone, form a sort of sub-bass to the lively chattering of the upper-shelfites, who declare that they feel quite awake—that they don’t think they shall go to sleep again to-night, and discourse over everything in creation, until you heartily wish you were enough related to them to give them a scolding.
At last, however, voice after voice drops off; you fall into a most refreshing slumber; it seems to you that you sleep about a quarter of an hour, when the chambermaid pulls you by the sleeve. “Will you please to get up, ma’am? We want to make the beds.” You start and stare. Sure enough, the night is gone. So much for sleeping on board canal-boats!
Let us not enumerate the manifold perplexities of the morning toilet in a place where every lady realizes most forcibly the condition of the old woman who lived under a broom: “All she wanted was elbow-room.” Let us not tell how one glass is made to answer for thirty fair faces, one ewer and vase for thirty lavations; and—tell it not in Gath—one towel for a company! Let us not intimate how ladies’ shoes have, in a night, clandestinely slid into the gentlemen’s cabin, and gentlemen’s boots elbowed, or, rather, toed their way among ladies’ gear, nor recite the exclamations after runaway property that are heard.
“I can’t find nothing of Johnny’s shoe!” “Here’s a shoe in the water-pitcher—is this it?” “My side-combs are gone!” exclaims a nymph with dishevelled curls. “Massy! do look at my bonnet!” exclaims an old lady, elevating an article crushed into as many angles as there are pieces in a mince-pie. “I never did sleep so much together in my life,” echoes a poor little French lady, whom despair has driven into talking English.
But our shortening paper warns us not to prolong our catalogue of distresses beyond reasonable bounds, and therefore we will close with advising all our friends, who intend to try this way of travelling for pleasure, to take a good stock both of patience and clean towels with them, for we think that they will find abundant need for both.
CHAPTER IV.
“SAMPLES” HERE AND THERE.
Next comes Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland with her Western sketches. Many will remember her laughable description of “Borrowing Out West,” with its two appropriate mottoes: “Lend me your ears,” from Shakespeare, and from Bacon: “Grant graciously what you cannot refuse safely.”
“‘Mother wants your sifter,’ said Miss Ianthe Howard, a young lady of six years’ standing, attired in a tattered calico thickened with dirt; her unkempt locks straggling from under that hideous substitute for a bonnet so universal in the Western country—a dirty cotton handkerchief—which is used ad nauseam for all sorts of purposes.
“‘Mother wants your sifter, and she says she guesses you can let her have some sugar and tea, ‘cause you’ve got plenty.’ This excellent reason, ”cause you’ve got plenty,’ is conclusive as to sharing with neighbors.
“Sieves, smoothing-irons, and churns run about as if they had legs; one brass kettle is enough for a whole neighborhood, and I could point to a cradle which has rocked half the babies in Montacute.
“For my own part, I have lent my broom, my thread, my tape, my spoons, my cat, my thimble, my scissors, my shawl, my shoes, and have been asked for my combs and brushes, and my husband for his shaving apparatus and pantaloons.”
Mrs. Whither, whose “Widow Bedott” is a familiar name, resembles Mrs. Kirkland in her comic portraitures, which were especially good of their kind, and never betrayed any malice. The “Bedott Papers” first appeared in 1846, and became popular at once. They are good examples of what they simply profess to be: an amusing series of comicalities.
I shall not quote from them, as every one who enjoys that style of humor knows them by heart. It would be as useless as copying “Now I lay me down to sleep,” or “Mary had a little lamb,” for a child’s collection of verses!
There are many authors whom I cannot represent worthily in these brief limits. When, encouraged by the unprecedented popularity of this venture, I prepare an encyclopaedia of the “Wit and Humor of American Women,” I can do justice to such writers as “Gail Hamilton” and Miss Alcott, whose “Transcendental Wild Oats” cannot be cut. Rose Terry Cooke thinks her “Knoware” the only funny thing she has ever done. She is greatly mistaken, as I can soon prove. “Knoware” ought to be printed by itself to delight thousands, as her “Deacon’s Week” has already done. To search for a few good things in the works of my witty friends is searching not for the time-honored needle in a hay-mow, but for two or three needles of just the right size out of a whole paper of needles.