 | Eli Perkins (at large) |  |
THE SWELLS AT SARATOGA.
ELI MOURNS BECAUSE HE CANNOT DANCE THE ROUND
DANCES.
Conversations as varied as
the crowd greet you on every
hand at Saratoga. Last night
Mr. Winthrop, a young author
from Boston, was talking to Miss
Johnson from Oil City. Miss
Johnson is a beautiful girl—very
fashionable. No material expense
is spared to make her attractive.
She is gored and puckered to
match her pannier, and ruffled
and fluted and cut on the bias to
correspond with her overskirt, but, alas! her literary
knowledge is limited.
As Mr. Winthrop was promenading up and down
the balcony last night, he remarked to Miss Johnson
as he opened Mr. Jenkins's English book:
“Have you seen Ginx's Baby, Miss Johnson?”
“Oh, Mr. Winthrop! I think all babies are dreadful—awful—perfectly
atrocious! Mrs. Ginx don't bring
her baby into the parlor, does she?”
“But how do you like Dame Europa's School, Miss
Johnson?” continued Mr. Winthrop.
“I don't like any school at all, Mr. Winthrop, except
dancing school—they're dreadful—perfectly atrocious!
O. the divine round dances, the—”
“Have you seen the Woman in White, by Wilkie
Collins, Miss Johnson?”
“No, but I saw the woman in dark blue by Commodore
Vanderbilt—and such a dancer—such a—”
“Did you see Napoleon's Julius Cæsar?” interrupted
Mr. Winthrop.
“Napoleon's Julius seize her! you don't say so, Mr.
Winthrop! Well, I don't wonder. I wanted to seize
her myself—any one who would wear such an atrocious
polonaise!”
And so, aristocratic Miss Johnson went on. In every
word she uttered I saw the superiority of the material
over the mental—the preponderance of milliner over
the schoolmaster. I was glad to sit with the poor
Boston author at the fountain of Miss Johnson's wisdom
—to drink in a perpetual flow of soul, and to feast on
reason.
But when a moment afterwards I saw Miss Johnson
and empty-headed Mr. Witherington of Fifth avenue
floating down the ball-room in the redowa, I felt that
my early education had been neglected.
“Alas, I cannot dance!” I sighed. “I cannot dance
the German!”
“O,” I sighed in the anguish of my heart, “would
that I had directed my education in other channels;
would that I had cultivated my brain less and my heels
more, and that books and art and architecture had
not drawn me aside from the festive dance. Would
and the great dome of St. Paul's were in chaos! Would
that Dickens and John Ruskin and old Hugh Miller
had never lived, and that the sublime coloring of Rembrandt
and Raphael had faded like the colors of a
rainbow.”
“After death comes the judgment; and what will it
profit a man to gain the whole world and fail with
Miss Johnson to dance the round dances?” In the
anguish of my heart I cry aloud, “May the Lord have
mercy on my soul and not utterly cut me off because
I have foolishly cultivated my brain while my heels
have rested idly in my boots.”
So I went on!
| Eli Perkins (at large) | |