University of Virginia Library

NORA MEHIDY;
OR, THE STRANGE ROAD TO THE HEART OF MR. HYPOLET LEATHERS.

Now, Heaven rest the Phœnicians for their pleasant
invention of the art of travel.

This is to be a story of love and pride, and the hero's
name is Hypolet Leathers.

You have smiled prematurely, my friend and reader,
if you “think you see” Mr. Leathers foreshadowed,
as it were, in his name.

(Three mortal times have I mended this son of a
goose of a pen, and it will not—as you see by the
three unavailing attempts recorded above—it will not
commence, for me, this tale, with a practicable beginning.)

The sun was rising (I think this promises well)—
leisurely rising was the sun on the opposite side of the
Susquehannah. The tall corn endeavored to lift its
silk tassel out of the sloppy fog that had taken upon
itself to rise from the water and prognosticate a hot fair
day, and the driver of the Binghamton stage drew over
his legs a two-bushel bag as he cleared the street of
the village, and thought that, for a summer's morning,
it was “very cold”—wholly unaware, however,
that, in murmuring thus, he was expressing himself
as Hamlet did while waiting for his father's ghost upon
the platform.

Inside the coach were three passengers. A gentleman
sat by the window on the middle seat, with his
cloak over his lap, watching the going to heaven of
the fog that had fulfilled its destiny. His mind was
melancholy—partly for the contrast he could not but
draw between this exemplary vapor and himself, who
was “but a vapor,”[1] and partly that his pancreas began
to apprehend some interruption of the thoroughfare
above—or, in other words, that he was hungry
for his breakfast, having gone supperless to bed. He
mused as he rode. He was a young man, about
twenty-five, and had inherited from his father, John
Leathers, a gentleman's fortune, with the two drawbacks
of a name troublesome to Phœbus (“Phœbus!
what a name!”), and premature gray hair. He was,
in all other respects, a finished and well-conditioned
hero—tall, comely, courtly, and accomplished—and
had seen the sight-worthy portions of the world, and
knew their differences. Travel, indeed, had become
a kind of diseased necessity with him—for he fled
from the knowledge of his name, and from the observation
of his gray hair, like a man fleeing from two
fell phantoms. He was now returning from Niagara,

and left the Mohawk route to see where the Susquehannah
makes its Great Bend in taking final leave of
Mr. Cooper, who lives above; and at the village of
the Great Bend he was to eat that day's breakfast.

On the back seat, upon the leather cushion, behind
Mr. Leathers, sat two other chilly persons, a middle-aged
man and a girl of sixteen—the latter with her
shawl drawn close to her arms, and her dark eyes bent
upon her knees, as if to warm them (as unquestionably
they did). Her black curls swung out from her
bonnet, like ripe grapes from the top of an arbor—
heavy, slumberous, bulky, prodigal black curls—oh,
how beautiful! And I do not know that it would be
a “trick worth an egg” to make any mystery of these
two persons. The gentleman was John Mehidy, the
widowed tailor of Binghamton, and the lady was Nora
Mehidy, his daughter; and they were on their way to
New York to change the scene, Mrs. Mehidy having
left the painful legacy of love—her presence—behind
her. For, ill as he could afford the journey, Mr. Mehidy
thought the fire of Nora's dark eyes might be
put out with water, and he must go where every
patch and shred would not set her a weeping. She
“took it hard,” as they describe grief for the dead in
the country.

The Great Bend is a scene you may look at with
pleasure, even while waiting for procrastinated prog,
and Hypolet Leathers had been standing for ten minutes
on the high bank around which the Susquehannah
sweeps, like a train of silver tissue after a queen
turning a corner, when past him suddenly tripped Nora
Mehidy bonnetless, and stood gazing on the river
from the outer edge of the precipice. Leathers's visual
consciousness dropped into that mass of clustering
hair like a ring into the sea, and disappeared.
His soul dived after it, and left him with no sense or
remembrance of how his outer orbs were amusing
themselves. Of what unpatented texture of velvet,
and of what sifting of diamond dust were those lights
and shadows manufactured! What immeasurable
thickness in those black flakes—compared, with all
locks that he had ever seen, as an edge of cocoameat,
fragrantly and newly broken, to a torn leaf, limp
with wilting. Nora stood motionless, absorbed in the
incomparable splendor of that silver hook bent into
the forest—Leathers as motionless, absorbed in her
wilderness of jetty locks—till the barkeeper rang the
bell for them to come to breakfast. Ah, Hypolet!
Hypolet! what dark thought came to share, with that
innocent beefsteak, your morning's digestion!

That tailors have, and why they have, the handsomest
daughters, in all countries, have been points
of observation and speculation for physiology, written
and unwritten. Most men know the fact. Some
writers have ventured to guess at the occult secret.
But I think “it needs no ghost, come from the grave,”
to unravel the matter. Their vocation is the embellishment—partly
indeed the creation—of material
beauty. If philosophy sit on their shears (as it should
ever), there are questions to decide which discipline
the sense of beauty—the degree in which fashion
should be sacrificed to becomingness, and the resistance
to the invasion of the poetical by whim and
usage, for example—and as a man thinketh—to a certain
degree—so is his daughter. Beauty is the business-thought
of every day, and the desire to know
how best to remedy its defects is the ache and agony
of the tailor's soul, if he be ambitious. Why should
not this have its exponent on the features of the race,
as other strong emotions have—plastic and malleable
as the human body is, by habit and practice. Shakspere,
by-the-way, says—

and I own to the dulness of never till now apprehending
that this remarkable passage typifies the steeping
of superfine broadcloth (made into superfine habits)
into the woof and warp of the tailor's idiosyncracy.
Q. E. D.

Nora Mehidy had ways with her that, if the world
had not been thrown into a muss by Eve and Adam,
would doubtless have been kept for queens. Leathers
was particularly struck with her never lifting up
her eyelids till she was ready. If she chanced to be
looking thoughtfully down when he spoke to her,
which was her habit of sadness just now, she heard
what he had to say and commenced replying—and
then, slowly, up went the lids, combing the loving air
with their long lashes, and no more hurried than the
twilight taking its fringes off the stars. It was adorable—altogether
adorable! And her hands and lips,
and feet and shoulders, had the same contemptuous
and delicious deliberateness.

On the second evening, at half-past five—just half
an hour too late for the “Highlander” steamer—the
“Binghamton stage” slid down the mountain into
Newburgh. The next boat was to touch at the pier
at midnight, and Leathers had six capacious hours to
work on the mind of John Mehidy. What was the
process of that fiendish temptation, what the lure and
the resistance, is a secret locked up with Moloch—
but it was successful! The glorious chevelure of the
victim—(sweet descriptive word—chevelure!)—the
matchless locks that the matchlocks of armies should
have defended—went down in the same boat with Nora
Mehidy, but tied up in Mr. Leathers' linen pocket-handkerchief!
And, in one week from that day, the
head of Hypolet Leathers was shaven nude, and the
black curls of Nora Mehidy were placed upon its
irritated organs in an incomparable WIG!!

A year had elapsed. It was a warm day, in No. 77
of the Astor, and Hypolet Leathers, Esq., arrived a
week before by the Great Western, sat aiding the
evaporation from his brain by lotions of iced lavender.
His wig stood before him, on the blockhead that was
now his inseparable companion, the back toward him;
and, as the wind chased of the volatile lavender from
the pores of his skull, he toyed thoughtfully with the
lustrous curls of Nora Mehidy. His heart was on
that wooden block! He dressed his own wig habitually,
and by dint of perfuming, combing, and caressing
those finger-like ringlets—he had tangled up his
heart in their meshes. A phantom, with the superb
face of the owner, stayed with the separated locks, and
it grew hourly more palpable and controlling. The
sample had made him sick at heart for the remainder.
He wanted the rest of Nora Mehidy. He had come
over for her. He had found John Mehidy, following
his trade obscurely in a narrow lane, and he had asked
for Nora's hand. But though this was not the whole
of his daughter, and he had already sold part of her
to Leathers, he shook his head over his shiny shears.
Even if Nora could be propitiated after the sacrifice
she had made (which he did not believe she could be),
he would as lief put her in the world of spirits as in a
world above him. She was his life, and he would not
give his life willingly to a stranger who would take it
from him, or make it too fine for his using. Oh, no!
Nora must marry a tailor, if she marry at all—and
this was the adamantine resolution, stern and without
appeal, of John Mehidy.

Some six weeks after this, a new tailoring establishment
of great outlay and magnificence was opened
in Broadway. The show-window was like a new revelation
of stuff for trowsers, and resplendent, but not
gaudy, were the neckcloths and waistcoatings—for
absolute taste reigned over all. There was not an article
on show possible to William street—not a waistcoat
that, seen in Maiden lane, would not have been
as unsphered as the Lost Pleiad in Botany Bay. It
was quite clear that there was some one of the firm

of “Mehidy & Co.” (the new sign) who exercised
his taste “from within, out,” as the Germans say of
the process of true poetry. He began inside a gentleman,
that is to say, to guess at what was wanted for
a gentleman's outside. He was a tailor-gentleman,
and was therefore, and by that quality only, fitted to
be a gentleman's tailor.

The dandies flocked to Mehidy & Co. They
could not be measured immediately—oh no! The
gentleman to be built was requested to walk about the
shop for a half hour, till the foreman got him well in
his eye, and then to call again in a week. Meantime
he would mark his customer in the street, to see how
he performed. Mehidy & Co. never ventured to take
measure for terra incognita. The man's gait, shrug,
speed, style, and quality, were all to be allowed for,
and these were not seen in a minute. And a very
sharp and stylish looking fellow seemed that foreman
to be. There was evidently spoiled some very capable
stuff for a lord when he was made a tailor.

And, faith! it was a study to see him take a customer's
measure! The quiet contempt with which he
overruled the man's indigenous idea of a coat!—the
rather satirical comments on his peculiarities of wearing
his kerseymere!—the cool survey of the adult to
be embellished, as if he were inspecting him for admission
to the grenadiers! On the whole, it was a
nervous business to be measured for a coat by that
fellow with the devilish fine head of black hair!

And, with the hair upon his head, from which Nora
had once no secrets—with the curls upon his cheek
and temples which had once slumbered peacefully
over hers, Hypolet Leathers, the foreman of “Mehidy
& Co.,” made persevering love to the tailor's magnificent
daughter. For she was magnificent! She
had just taken that long stride from girl to woman,
and her person had filled out to the imperial and voluptuous
model indicated by her deliberate eyes.
With a dusky glow in her cheek, that looked like a
peach teinted by a rosy twilight, her mouth, up to the
crimson edge of its bow of Cupid, was moulded with
the slumberous fairness of newly wrought sculpture,
and gloriously beautiful in expression. She was a
creature for whom a butterfly might do worm over
again—to whose condition in life, if need be, a prince
might proudly come down. Ah, queenly Nora Mehidy!

But the wooing—alas! the wooing throve slowly!
That lovely head was covered again with prodigal
locks, in short and massive clusters, but Leathers was
pertinacious as to his property in the wig, and its becomingness
and indispensableness—and to be made
love to by a man in her own hair!—to be obliged to
keep her own dark curls at a respectful distance!—to
forbid all intercourse between them and their children-ringlets,
as it were—it roughened the course of
Leathers's true love that Nora must needs be obliged
to reason on such singular dilemmas. For, though a
tailor's daughter, she had been furnished by nature
with an imagination!

But virtue, if nothing more and no sooner, is its
own reward, and in time “to save its bacon.” John
Mehidy's fortune was pretty well assured in the course
of two years, and made, in his own line, by his proposed
son-in-law, and he could no longer refuse to
throw into the scale the paternal authority. Nora's
hair was, by this time, too, restored to its pristine
length and luxuriousness, and, on condition that Hypolet
would not exact a new wig from his new possessions,
Nora, one summer's night, made over to him
the remainder. The long-exiled locks revisited their
natal soil, during the caresses which sealed the compact,
and a very good tailor was spoiled the week
after, for the married Leathers became once more a
gentleman at large, having bought, in two instalments,
at an expense of a hundred dollars, a heart, and two
years of service, one of the finest properties of which
Heaven and a gold ring ever gave mortal the copyhold!