Марион Харланд

Marion Harland
Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea
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FAMILIAR TALK WITH THE READER.
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I should be indeed flattered could I believe that you hail with as much pleasure as I do the renewal of the “Common-Sense Talks,” to which I first invited you four years ago. For I have much to say to you in the same free-masonic, free-and-easy strain in which you indulged me then.

It is a wild March night. Winter and Summer, Spring-time and Autumn, the wind sings, or plains at my sitting-room window. To-night its shout is less fierce than jocund to my ear, for it says, between the castanet passages of hail and sleet, that neither friend nor bore will interrupt our conference. Shutters and curtains are closed; the room is still, bright, and warm, and we are no longer strangers.

The poorest man of my acquaintance counts his money by the million, has a superb mansion he calls “home,” a wife and beautiful children who call him “husband” and “father.” He has friends by the score, and admirers by the hundred, for human nature has not abated one jot in prudential sycophancy since the Psalmist summed up a volume of satirical truth in the pretended “aside”—“and men will praise thee when thou doest well unto thyself.” For all that, he of whom I write is a pauper, inasmuch as he makes[2] his boast that he never experienced the emotion of gratitude. He has worked his own way in the world, he is wont to say: has never had helping hand from mortal man or woman. It is a part of his religion to pay for all he gets, and never to ask a favor. Nevertheless, he confesses, with a complacent smirk that would be amusing were it not so pitiable an exhibition of his real beggary—“that he would like to know what it feels like to be grateful,—just for the sake of the novel sensation!”

Poor wretch! I am sorry I introduced him here and now. There is a savage growl in the wind; our snuggery is a trifle less pleasant since I began to talk of him. Although I only used him as a means of “leading up” to the expression of my own exceeding and abundant wealth of gratitude to you, dear Reader and Friend. If I had only time and strength enough to bear me through the full relation of the riches and happiness you have conferred upon me! There are letters in that desk over there between the windows that have caused me to look down with a sense of compassionate superiority upon Nathan Rothschild and the Duke of Brunswick. I am too modest (or miserly) to show them; but now and then, when threatened with a fit of self-depreciation, I come in here, lock the door, stop the keyhole, get them out and read them anew. For three days thereafter I walk on air. For the refrain of all is the same. “You have been a help to me!” And only He who knows the depths, sad and silent, or rich and glad, of the human heart can understand how much I wanted to help you. Verily, I have in this matter had my reward. Again, I say, I[3] am grateful. Had I “helped” you a hundred times as well as I have, I should still be your debtor.

May I read you somewhat copious extracts from a letter I received, the other day, from a wide-awake New England girl? Not only wide-awake, but refined, original and sprightly; a girl whom though I have never seen her face, I know to be a worker in life as well as a thinker. She says some things much better than I could have put them, and others as noteworthy, which I wish to answer,—or, try to answer—since I recognize in her a representative of a class, not very large, perhaps, but certainly one of the most respectable and honored of all those for whom I write the “Common-Sense Series.” I should like to give the letter in full, from the graphic touches with which she sketches herself, “sitting upon the kitchen-table, reading ‘Common Sense in the Household,’” one bright morning, when herself and sisters had taken possession of the kitchen to make preparation for “an old New England tea-party,” at which their only assistant was to be “a small maiden we keep to have the privilege of waiting upon, and doing our own work into the bargain; who, in waiting at table, was never known to pass anything on the right side, and has an invincible objection to learning how”—to the conclusion, over against which she has, like the frank woman she is, set her name and address in full.

But the modesty (or miserliness) aforesaid rises in sudden arms to forbid the reproduction at my hand of certain portions of the epistle, and it would be neither kind nor honorable to set down in prospective print her pictures of home life and dramatis person;.[4] Steering clear, when possible, of these visible rocks and sunken reefs, I will indulge you and myself with a part of that which has added sensibly to my treasures—not debt—mind you! of gratitude.

“I want to tell you how much your compilation does for those poor mortals whom it rescues from the usual class of cook-books.”

A reef, you see, before we are out of harbor! We will skip two pages to get at one of the well-said things I spoke of just now.