Page:Peterson Magazine 1869B.pdf/205

 MRS. MARCH'S

BOARDERS.

BY CLARA AUGUSTA. Has 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.

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 mautel-shelf, and a marble-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 body that they see how delightfully they have albion, with the picters of her father and mother, and her husband's father and mother, spent the summer. Isaac, that's my second son, and he's been a and all their folks, and Napoleon Bonyparte, hoss-car conductor in Bosting, and has seen a and Gineral Stark, and Jenny Lind, and lots of powerful sight of high life, says that they don't others that I disremember intirely. go into the country for pleasure-they go beAs soon as I seed them things in that parlor cause somebody else does. He says a woman my mind was made up. I'd take boarders too. would lose caste if she stayed to home while the I'm a widder woman, and my brother, Lemuel rest of her neighbors was off. I dunna what Hanscom, lives with me. He owns the sheep's caste means, but mebby you do. Isaac has been pasture and the ten-acre wood lot, so I allers to school two year to the Mount Benbo Ceme- try not to be disrespectful to him. He's a nice man, but he's dreadful nigh to tery, and he is dreadful high- flown sense he come back. being a monymanyach. He's had a sight of A year ago last summer, Miss Brown-the these ere Patent Office Reports sent to him from colonel's wife -she took boarders, and she got Washington, and they've long ago sot him crazy rich on it ! She had as much as a dozen, and to invent sunthin'. And fer more than five year made a sight of money. Folks did pretend to he's been a whittling, and boring and sawing say that she nigh about starved her boarders ; { away the best of the time, a trying to make but then everybody knows city folks is genteel, some kind of a machine that'll never stop going. and genteel people, it stands to reason, don't Perpetual motion, he calls it. He says if he can need so much to eat as common folks. They only git it, and he's serting he can in time, he shall be a richer man than Judge Fishtell that live on ceremony and perliteness some. Mrs. Brown, she saved enuff out of her lives over to the corner, and keeps two hosses, boarders to pay all expenses, and new furnish and drinks brandy that is twenty dollars a her parlor, besides putting a portagal over the gallon. Lemuel hain't really no right to meddle in front door, and buying a pearley shawl for herself, and a ten-dollar thing, made out of hair my affairs, but when I'm a going to do anything and stuff, for her darter Ann to pin onto the oncommon, I ginerally speak to him about it, back part of her head to set her bunnit onto. jest for the looks of the thing. So, after I'd made up my mind about the It's the slickest thing to keep a bunnit from slipping. And there's that ere purple silk bun- boarders, says I to him, says I, nit of mine, that I've had nigh onto five years, "Lem, I'm a going to take city boarders this it's all the time a slipping off from my head ; { summer. " 188