Suburban Sketches eBook

this sad business was the poor thing’s forte.  In another company was a lady who had conquered all the easy attitudes of young men of the second or third fashion, and who must have been at something of a loss to identify herself when personating a woman off the stage.  But Nature asserted herself in a way that gave a curious and scarcely explicable shock in the case of that dancer whose impudent song required the action of fondling a child, and who rendered the passage with an instinctive tenderness and grace, all the more pathetic for the profaning boldness of her super masculine dress or undress.  Commonly, however, the members of these burlesque troupes, though they were not like men, were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both.  It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.  Yet whoever beheld these burlesque sisters, must have fallen into perplexing question in his own mind as to whose was the wrong involved.  It was not the fault of the public—­all of us felt that:  was it the fault of the hard-working sisterhood, bred to this as to any other business, and not necessarily conscious of the indecorum which pains my reader,—­obliged to please somehow, and aiming, doubtless, at nothing but applause?  “La Belle Helene” suggests the only reasonable explanation:  "C’est la fatalite.”

FLITTING

I would not willingly repose upon the friendship of a man whose local attachments are weak.  I should not demand of my intimate that he have a yearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the scenes of his own boyhood; that is not in American nature; on the contrary, he is but a poor creature who does not hate the village where he was born; yet a sentiment for the place where one has lived two or three years, the hotel where one has spent a week, the sleeping car in which one has ridden from Albany to Buffalo,—­so much I should think it well to exact from my friend in proof of that sensibility and constancy without which true friendship does not exist.  So much I am ready to yield on my own part to a friend’s demand, and I profess to have all the possible regrets for Benicia Street, now I have left it.  Over its deficiencies I cast a veil of decent oblivion, and shall always try to look upon its worthy and consoling aspects, which were far the more numerous.  It was never otherwise, I imagine, than an ideal region in very great measure; and if the reader whom I have sometimes seemed to direct thither, should seek it out, he would hardly find my Benicia Street by the city sign-board.  Yet this is not wholly because it was an ideal locality, but because much of its reality has now become merely historical, a portion of the tragical poetry of the past.  Many of the vacant lots abutting upon Benicia and the intersecting