Page:Peterson Magazine 1869B.pdf/189

 MRS. MARCH'S BOARDERS.

BY CLARA AUGUSTA.

As ever any one of ye had any experience in taking city boarders? If you have, you needn't read this story, you can skip right on to the next one; but if you hain't, then I advise you to read it, and take warning by me.

It's got proper fashionable round here, in Peaville, for the farmer folks to take boarders from the city. It pays well, and anything that pays is pritty likely to be fashionable.

You see, these ere city people come out here to git a sniff of fresh air, and injoy the huckleberries and miskeeters, of which we ginerally have oceans.

Then they go home about the first of September, all burnt and tanned, and bit up, with all their clothes ruinated, and not a grate sight of money into their purses; and they tell every- body that they see how delightfully they have spent the summer.

Isaac, that’s my second son, and he’s been a hoss-car conductor in Bosting, and has seen a powerful sight of high life, says that they don’t go into the country for pleasure—they go because somebody else does. He says a woman would lose caste if she stayed to home while the rest of her neighbors was off. I dunna what caste means, but mebby you do. Isaac has been to school two year to the Mount Beabo Cemetory, and he is dreadful high-flown sense he come back.

A year ago last summer, Miss Brown—the colonel’s wife—she took boarders, and she got rich on it! She had as much as a dozen, and made a sight of money. Folks did pretend to say that she nigh about starved her boarders; but then everybody knows city folks is genteel, and genteel people, it stands to reason, don’t need so much to eat as common folks. They live on ceremony and perliteness some.

Mrs. Brown, she saved enuff out of her boarders to pay all expenses, and new furnish her parlor, besides putting a portagal over the front door, and buying a pearley shawl for her- self, and a ten-dollar thing, made out of hair and stuff, for her darter Ann to pin onto the back part of her head to set her bunnit onto. It's the slickest thing to keep a bunnit from slipping. And there's that ere purple silk bun nit of mine, that I've had nigh onto five years, it's all the time a slipping off from my head; and Sundays, when I go to meeting, I set in Capen Webster's pew instid of ourn, because his is a wall-pew, and I can put the back part of my bunnit right up aginst the side of the meeting ' us, and that makes it stay pat.

Mrs. Brown's parlor is ilegant. There hain't nothing like it in Peaville.

There's a Brussels carpet that is soft as a piller-tick when you step onto it ; and the cheers and sofys is kivered with green stuff that looks like the minister's wife's velvet bunnit; and there's two ottermans, and a picter of Henry Clay with a blue cloak on, and three chany Then they go home about the first of Sep- dogs on the mantel-shelf, and a marbie-topped tember, all burnt and tanned, and bit up, with table that looks jest as the grave-stuns in the all their clothes ruinated, and not a grate sight burying-ground does -only there ain't no deof money into their purses; and they tell every- scription on it. And she's got a fotygraft albion, with the picters of her father and mother, and her husband's father and mother, and all their folks, and Napoleon Bonyparte, and Gineral Stark, and Jenny Lind, and lots of others that I disremember intirely.

As soon as I seed them things in that parlor my mind was made up. I'd take boarders too.

I'm a widder woman, and my brother, Lemuel Hanscom, lives with me. He owns the sheep's pasture and the ten-acre wood lot, so I allers try not to be disrespectful to him.

He's a nice man, but he's dreadful nigh to being a monymanyach. He's had a sight of these ere Patent Office Reports sent to him from Washington, and they've long ago sot him crazy to invent sunthin'. And fer more than five year he's been a whittling, and boring and sawing away the best of the time, a trying to make some kind of a machine that'll never stop going. Perpetual motion, he calls it. He says if he can only git it, and he’s serting he can in time, ke shall be a richer man than Judge Fishtell that lives over to the corner, and keeps two hosses, and drinks brandy that is twenty dollars a the gallon.

Lemuel hain't really no right to meddle in my affairs, but when I'm a going to do anything oncommon, I ginerally speak to him about it, jest for the looks of the thing.

So, after I'd made up my mind about the boarders, says I to him, says I,

" Lem, I'm a going to take city boarders this summer."