Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1874 — MRS. FRYER, DEACON WHIPPLE, AND AUNT SALLY. [ARTICLE]

MRS. FRYER, DEACON WHIPPLE, AND AUNT SALLY.

The sisters Jennie and Harriet Millfungus occupied a third-story room in a human hive together with some twenty •other families in various stages of_distress, ignorance and bestiality. Like many others, they lived in a moral solitude as profound as that of any moun-

tain-top. Companionship with what was about them was impossible, and there was do man or woman outside to meet them with even a look that acknowledged them. They were desperately poor. And again, like thousands of others, they stitched all the minutes of seventeen working hours, and just did not starve and freeze.’ It seems incredible that any human being in a world of, resources like ours should be condemned th such a life. LJyen an animal hunting its food enjoys a pleasurable play of muscle and prompting of instinct. An oyster in its bed, a sponge rooted fast, yet thrills to the electric stir of wind and wave. But these step-daughters of the Old Woman in the Shoe, these Hagars in the great city wilderness, in mind, heart and body —look and you will find them not only in the alleys of the poor, but at your own door by thousands. It was on one of those early nipping days, bleaker than those of the later winter. Each sat by her little window, sewing in hand. Each was not cold, but quietly and entirely qhilled, as you are when caught under a long sermon in a damp and” fireless church. There was only a glimmer of fire in the stove. They had made a breakfast on weak black tea and bread with almost no butter at half-past five, and had been sitting since almost motionless, except foF the right hand and arm. And in trying to realize their state (and I am very anxious that you should realize it, and not think of them in the vague, picturesque way, for example, that we think of the people of Antigua, chanting prayers for mercy between the shocks of earthquake) this fact is to be remembered: We, a party of seven, once took summer quarters and a course of amateur starvation together, and discovered to our astonishment that one “ square meal” after such a course was not sufficient to do away with the sense of hunger and waste. We were still in arrears to Nature, and it required a “ square” series to bring the body up to its normal state. So in this instance these poor girls were bending under the exhaustion not of that day only, but of the many such days preceding, the weariness and dejection of many such breakfastings and long stagnations. Each, as I told you, sat by her window, though' there was little enough to see. A jumble of roofs, a prowling cat, some pigeons in consultation, a mound of rubbish, a battered roll of tin roofing. But there was a bit of sky, cloudless and clear, and, thought Jennie, “ somebody stood among pines on some mountain; top and saw it just as she saw it, only in all its breadth.” The notion pleased her. It gave her a share in the pleasant world outside, at least as large as this bit of blue was broad. She sat looking and her hands dropped in her lap, and the little half-finished boy’s jacket slid gently down on the floor. “ Harriet,”_slie asked, so abruptly that her eldest sister started, “do you think you love old Mrs. Fryer better than yourself?” Harriet stared, bewildered. “ What do you mean? You have such a habit, Jennie, of going off to mental Cochin Chinas and Perus without a word of warning to your friends! Now, what ever made you think of Mrs. Fryer ? And if you will do it, do; don't, please, jerk me after you, without any warning, either; it is so unsettling to the nerves! And the idea of loving old Mrs. Fryer at all. not to mention better than one’s self! Ridiculous!” ~“T thought so,” answered Jennie, composedly. “ And Deacon Whipple—have you a sincere esteem for him?” “ Esteem! Do you remember the night he made that beautiful prayer, and how the next morning he turned the widow Gobbins out of doors? and when he wanted Mrs. Winkle to taste his cherries he broke one in two and handed her the half? Gracious! Jennie, what ails you?” “Never mind that, but just answer me. There is our Aunt Sally —should you like to run your trains on her tracks, and switch off just when she gives the signal?” “ Jennie Millfungus! who knows better than you that Aunt Sally is Lot to our Abraham, and the land refuses to bear us both? It is my deliberate opinion that Solomon had her in mind, and nobody else, when he preferred the house-top to a brawling woman.” ‘.‘ And these are really the only persons we know!” continued Jennie, musingly — “our world! the only people who, hearing to-morrow that we were both dead, would even say, ‘Ah, indeed! I wonder, now, what they died of?’ No one else could be said to have forgotten us, because no one else ever remembers us. Mrs. Fryer, Deacon Whipple and Aunt Sally are our Public Opinion.” “ I am sure,” said Harriet, feebly, and looking uneasy, “ I always thought that public opinion was—well —was the whole United States.”

“ Very likely,” returned Jennie, indifferently. “ But I have been thinking. We have had no meat in a fortnight. We shall not dare to have one good fire this winter. Our shoes are as thin as paper, and in holes. We have not had a new corset in a year, either of us. We have three pairs of stockings between us, and two underskirts, and one thick shawl. We might as well be cannibals for all that we know of literature and art, although there is a picture-gallery four blocks away, and ten minutes’ walking would bring us to two libraries and a training-school for women. Such facts make one think. Are we really intruders in this glorious world, prowling about like vagabond cats and dogs, because no provision has been made for us? I do not believe it.” Harriet bristled. “ Now, Jennie, there is one thing I will' not listen to. When you come to fly right in the face of Providence, and reflect on His ways, I shall not hear you. / am going to acquiesce in the will of God.” “So am I,” said Jennie, with sparkling eyes. “To live in His Will, and .carry it out, too, is my intention, for I do not believe that our present life is of His will, but against it. You poor idolater, in what chapter is it written that two ablebodied young women are to work seventeen hours a day for the privilege of slowly starving mind and body? No, Harriet, your gospel is the Gospel of Gentility, and th* 3 God in whose will we have acquiesced so long is the dread of Mrs. Fryer, Deacon Whipple, and Aunt Sally.” “ How you talk!” said Harriet, more and more shocked. “It is not right to mjx things up like that, making light of sacred things.” “ How we h'ce/” retorted Jennie. ll To say that would be more to the purpose, I think. And why? Dig straight down to the root of the thing. As we must earn money or starve,, we work; but it has never occurred to us that it was possible for us to work for it after any other fashion than we are doing at present, for in that case what would

people say?—meaning Mrs. Fryer, Deacon Whipple and Aunt Sally, the only neople who could say anything about it. Though a large part of the world regards the tribe of sewing women with profound contempt, still the sewing woman in turn may sneer at the woman who goes publicly in and out of, the labor market, and earns her bread by force of muscle and drudgery; and that possibility turns the edge of the dispensation in the Fryer and Aunt Sally mind. Is not that what it amounts to? Gentility is the round of the ladder above some one else, and to stand on that, though only one remove from the bottom; we have slaved and starved without a single question about the possibility of doing anything else. Could we have done more for our God? Was there ever such a Moloch as this gentility, in whose outer court thousands of women like us are starving now?” “ There never was a Millfungus,” said Harriet, slowly, “ who was nol careful to keep up the gentility of the’ family. There was a Sir Something Millfungus in the days of Elizabeth, and there was a Col. Millfungus in the Revolutionary times who raised his own regiment; and our grandmother’s sister married into the Preston family—the Prestons of Philadelphia—and they say the Preston mansion is magnificent." “And they say,” broke in Jennie, “that the two "Millfungus sisters are living in a tenement-house, and sewing on little boys’ jackets by way of being genteel and emulating the Preston magnificence.” And here she laughed wildly —laughed, indeed, till tears of terror stood in Harriet’s meek eyes. “I am not mad, most noble Festus,” quoted Jennie, perceiving her sister’s apprehension; “only a little hysterical at the notion of bearing all this misery for Aunt Sally and old Mrs. Fryer. Do try to see reason, Harriet, Gentility backed by a bank account can stand alone; but gentility, worn thin and faded by time, is a drug in the market all over the world. Look at the two English advertisements that I cut from that English paper that fell in our way. You remember? The governess was to teach five children and assist in- the house-work and sewing. The servant in the family of three would be allowed the services of a boy tq perform the drudgery, the servant to receive half as much again as was offered the governess. And is there not much the same scale of values here?”

“Which means,” observed Harriet, doggedly, “ that you think of going out to service—a Millfungus in service! —and are trying to talk me over. But I never will consent. Never. I may be poor; but a mistress! to order me about! to go and do as one is bid! Jennie Millfungus, I wonder at you.” “ What is the woman who gives out our work but a mistress, and a hard one? Does she not tell you when to come, what you must do, and reprimand you sharplv into the bargain? I wonder at you. If there was a large demand for potatoes, and thejnarket was overstocked with apples, would you still persist in bringing apples? And yet at this work there are twenty to take our places tomorrow, at lower wages, too, while you surely are not deaf to the demand for good servants. And who is a better cook than you? And what is to prevent me from acting as a waitress? And why should we not take situations together in a family where there are no other servants? And why should you not receive sixteen dollars a month, and I twelve dollars—twenty-eight dollars a month besides our board? Where could we earn anything like that by sewing? We could re-stock our wardrobe,” “ I won’t hear of it, ” protested Harriet, obstinately. “No need of hearing, my dear, if you will only do it. Think! Besides the money, we should always be sufficiently warm, and get plenty of nourishing food. The exercise would build us up in health. There are evening schools ” “No, no; I won't! — I say I won't!" cried Harriet. “Every soul we know would cut us.” “There are so many we know!” retorted Jennie. “We see them so frequently, and then are so uplifted and gladdened by our intercourse! Oh, sister, can you not see that our life and its motive are weak, fictitious and diseased, and therefore we are cut off from all re sources? It is inconsistent; it has noth ing in common with the healthy ordering of the universe.” “To-spend our days in somebody’s greasy kitchen,” muttered Harriet. “ Put an apple see'd in the ground. Does it spend its days there? Ways will open if we but begin in the right place, like the apple seed. Come, sis, get on your bonnet.” Harriet recoiled. “Oh, not now! To-morrow, Jennie. You are so precipitate!” “ Yes, now, at once, while the iron is hot.”

We are honored by the friendship of the house of Baxter and know that there have been tribulation and friction therein—constant collisions of the Baxter nature, ideas, and requirements with the Power before the Range. But yesterday we met the mother of the house and, behold! she was beaming. “Congratulate me,” she began. “I am a happier woman than thp mother of the Gracchi! I have two gems of servants, American girls! a cook and waitress!—sisters! One is thirty; the other eighteen, and so handsome! And they reason about their work and plan it out beforehand. At her first dinner my waitress asked me for the name and chair of every member of the family and tlie proper place of everything. Fancy it! And she never made a single blunder! And they are refined! They have Tennyson and Mrs. Browning and Ruskin on their table, and one of them expresses herself so well! Such a sense of rest and peace has taken possession of us that I am not sure that we have not all died and gone to paradise. Their names? Oh, it is an odd name Millfungus— Harriet and Jennie Millfungus.”—Harper's Bazar.

Locking the stable door after the horse is stolen has a new illustration at Milford, N. H., where the bank directors are putting on a lock that would have absolutely prevented the recent great rbbbery. It is made on the same principle as a clock, and cannot be opened until a certain hour, by the cashier or any other man. -> . - < • —The Salt Lake Newt computes the number of polygamists in the Territory at 1,000 men, 3,000 women and 0,000 children, and the cost and loss by the punishment [of all at $2,000, and that the courts would have around them 3,000 crying women and 9,000 crying children. Marriage—The altar on which man lays his wallet and woman her attentions.