 | Saratoga in 1901 |  |
NEW YORK IN 1901.
FASHION'S CHANGES.
After my thirty years' absence. I found wonderful changes in
the city. There were social changes as well as geographical.
People hardly speak the same language. English cant phrases
had so crept into the language, that you could no more read the
books of 1871, than you could read the books of Chawser.
A party of Englishmen, headed by a son of Charles Dickens,
had built a London Hotel—the “Red Lion”—away up above
the park. This was the resort of all the young English “swells”
in town. The “Red Lion” was very Englishy. They didn't speak
American there at all.
Everybody wore number 16 English shoes, and one guinea
Fleet-street trowsers. The coats were generally of Pool's make.
Old Pool was dead, but his son Fitz Piercy Pool had a tailor-shop
in the hotel. When you see a coat that looks as if it was made
for the wearer's grandfather, you can put it down as a masterpiece
of old Pool, tailor to his Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales. In Europe, Horace Greeley, before his defeat by General
Grant killed him, would always have been taken as a patron of
Pool's. These Fitz-Pool coats were magnanimously made,
being in the English mode—about four sizes too large. They
were made with high collars and long tails. They overcame
the wearers to a great degree..
The “Red Lion” reminded one of the “Green Lion” in London,
where Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson used to get drunk. Alas!
I saw many Englishmen trying to follow in the footsteps of the
lamented Shak. when I was in London.
Many succeeded.
The rooms of the “Red Lion” were small, but then, as I before
remarked, they were Englishy. One of the guests, a young
Englishman, born in New York, told me he was bound to do the
straight English thing if he had to sleep in a 7x9 room, and
breakfast on a rasher of bacon and one roll. I told him this
would be the straight English mode, but that I preferred my
regular meals even though I had to submit to the indignity of
being called an American. Then I thought of Bunker Hill
Monument—my blood warmed a little, and I said, right among
the Red Lion foreigners—I said, “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon,
but I am proud of my nationality, and the time is far distant
when I shall desire to leave the proud Commonwealth of Connecticut
to become an Englishman.” This sentence I had read in
one of honest old Ben Butler's speeches on the Fishery question.
It sounded pretty, and so I used it. The young man addressed
said I was a blarsted Yankee from the Fifth avenue. His name
was Ezra Green, Jr. He was a high-toned New York Englishman,
and he turned and cast upon me an “imperial look.”
“I disdain a Yankee,” he said in scorn.
I thought this was queer when I remembered that his father
and mother once lived on Second-avenue—over there where the
Fifth-avenue fellows used to go to flirt with the girls on Sunday
afternoons.
Alas! Ezra's father was once a tailor on Avenue II. Time
passed, and this respectable tailor grew to be a
MERCHANT
TAILOR.
More time went on. Providence prospered Ezra, and his coats
fitted well. He spent much of his feeble income in improved
signs. One day they saw a flashy painter paint these letters
over his door:
Ezra Green,
MERCHANT Tailor and IMPORTER
More time skipped along, the tailor moved up town, and they
saw Ezra raise the imperial arms of England and France on
each end of his sign. Then it read, in bright gilt letters—
Alas! the poor “tailor” became smaller and smaller, until it
faded entirely away—and still Ezra made clothes.
One day a retired Broadway merchant saw the imposing sign,
and stepping in, innocently asked Ezra the price of “exchange
on London.”
“The price of the which?” inquired Ezra, sticking his shears
behind his ears.
“O! I am mistaken. You do not do bank business?”
Ezra said he made clothes for a good many bankers, but the
Broadway merchant slid away as if ashamed of his mistake.
Fortune smiled upon Ezra, affluence gilded his destiny, and
his clothes wore well. He rode in a liveried landaulet, traveled
in foreign climes, revelled with the nobility in palaces without
expending a cent outside for patching his pants. His career was
happy and glorious abroad, and his breeches never ripped at
home. When they wanted him to return to his native land he
said—this tailor said:
“Away, base hirelings—dost know a Prophet is without honor
in his own country?”
But, alas! Ezra was wrong. Profit is always honored in New
York. I said, “Look at Mr. Claflin and Mr. Stewart; they used
to buy and sell cloth, and still they once had front seats at the
Grand Duke's ball.”
| Saratoga in 1901 | |