LADIES' NATIONAL MAGAZINE.
SHOPPING.
BY MRS. A. M. F. ANNAN.
"TO FRANCIS HEADLEY, Esq.
WHY failed you to be at my house warming, dear Frank, you and your gentle wife? The marble palace, as, in your honest simplicity, you are unsuspecting enough to believe my structure of brick, paint and stucco; the marble palace is finished from corner-stone to roof-tree, and I have received the congratulations of scores who really hope I have bettered my condition, and of a still larger number who rejoice in the prospect of a new place for dining out, on my being at last domiciliated in a ‘home.’ But what a desecration of the word! I never was less at home in my life—I, a solitary man, occupying these long suites of large apartments—how is it that Byron expresses the sensations?
'A sort of chill comes o'er me, when alone,
Seeing what's made for many with but one'
In my boarding-house I really could have a little domestic enjoyment. My two rooms and all they contained were within the range of my eye, and I became familiar with them accordingly. When I seated myself in my arm-chair, pulled forward the handirons to their proper line, drew up an ottoman for my feet and a table for my elbow, I felt as if I were gathering my family about me, and for every object I had a separate regard. Here, it will take me a lustrum to become acquainted with the multitudinous things the cabinet-makers and upholsterers have hung up and spread down and ranged around, all, as I am to understand, for my gratification. And yet it must be done. It would be shabby to creep into a corner, and the house must be kept from moulding; therefore I must inhabit it all over—I, myself. Then, there is no little sanctum in which I might find a moment's relief, as in all truly home-like establishments, no retreat, such as gentlemen of your class are enriched with, in which you may enjoy the busy idleness of snipping threads and patches, gathered from the carpet, the interesting distress of not knowing where to lean, that you will not make creases in some dainty fabric of female garniture, or the agreeable agony of skinning your ancles on the rockers of a cradle.
"Let me stop for a moment to fancy you laughing in your sleeve at the idea that I am too sheepish to come to the point at once, and pluming yourself on your sagacious discovery of what all this tends to without further explanation of mine. Well, have done—for I assure you I can say it out as coolly as a professed flirt says, ‘I’m very sorry,’ &c. &c., to the hundredth ineligible proposal. I now, Frank, find the want of a wife; there! I have decided, at length, to soar above the chrysalis of the old bachelor.
"Old, forsooth! how happens it that I am stigmatized as an old bachelor, while you, with a matronly wife and half-a-dozen sturdy children, are still designated as a youngish married man, though you are full a year my senior? do I look old? that I deny, yet it is in vain I assert that my unfaded locks are of spontaneous growth, and that my teeth are not patent metallic. Is it my manners? toward men I flatter myself that they are of a very common order, and toward women—yet when I think of it, there must be the front of my offending. The first woman into whose way I was thrown after I had began to consider myself a man, inspired me with an awe which has ever since attached itself to the whole sex, imparting to my address toward them a stiffness and timidity so uncommon now-a-days, that the fair creatures regard them as remnants of some era too long gone for their cognizance.
«You remember her to whom I allude?—yet how could any one forget the rarely beautiful, the nobly gifted, the high-hearted, the altogether peerless Eugenia Sinclair! I have thought much of her since my new want has awakened, and I feel that my vivid recollections of her have given me aspirations too high even to be realized. The world holds no second Eugenia Sinclair, and if it did, what am I, that I should think of winning her? You have sometimes called her my first
