: Punch or the London Charivari Volume 101 November 14 1891 by Various - English wit and humor Periodicals Punch

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VOL. 101.

November 14th, 1891.

LETTERS TO ABSTRACTIONS.

DEAR VANITY,

I think I can see you smirking and posturing before the abstract mirror, which is your constant companion. It pleases you, no doubt, to think that anybody should pay you the compliment of making you the object and the subject of a whole letter. Perhaps when you have read it to the end you will alter your mood, since it cannot please you to listen to the truth about yourself. None of those whom you infect here below ever did like it. Sometimes, to be sure, it had to be endured with many grimaces, but it was extraordinary to note how the clouds caused by the aggravated truth-teller passed away as soon as his departure had enabled the object of these reproaches to recover his or her false self again. What boots it, after all, to tell the truth? For those whom you protect are clad in armour, which is proof against the sharpest lance, and they can thus bid defiance to all the clumsy attacks of the merely honest and downright--for a time; but in the end their punishment comes, not always in the manner that their friends predict, but none the less inevitable in one manner or another. For they all fashion a ridiculous monster out of affectations, strivings and falsehoods, and label it "Myself;" and in the end the monster takes breath, and lives and crushes his despised maker, and immediately vanishes into space.

Was there ever in this world so delightful a family circle as that of the Deanery? The daughters were all pretty, but that was their smallest merit. They were all clever, and well-read, without a tinge of the bluestocking, and most of them were musical to the tips of their slender fingers. How merrily their laughter used to ring across the ancient close, and how playfully and gently they used to rally the dear learned old Dean who had watched over them and cared for them since Mrs. MAYBLOOM'S death, many years before, with all the tender care of the most devoted mother. And of this fair and smiling throng, "my only rosary," as the Dean used to call them, HERMIONE was, I think, the prettiest, as she was certainly the most accomplished. Every kind of gift had been showered upon her by Nature. When she played her violin, accompanied by her elder sister on the piano, tears trickled unbidden down the aquiline nose of the militant Bishop of Archester, the chapter stood hushed to a man, and the surrounding curates were only prevented by a salutary fear of ruining their chances of preferment from laying themselves, their pittances, and their garnered store of slippers at her pretty feet. Then in a fit of charming petulance, she would break off in the middle of the piece, lay down her violin, and, with a pretty imperiousness, command a younger sister to fetch her zither, on which to complete the subjugation of her adorers. And then her caricatures--summer-lightning flashes of pencilled wit, as I heard the Reverend SIMEON COPE describe them in a moment of enthusiasm after she had shown us her sketch of his rival, the Reverend STEPHEN HANKINSON.

But even in those days, while she still had about her all the fascinations of peerless beauty and fresh and glowing youth, I mistrusted her. Alone of all the sisters she seemed to me to be wanting in heart. I heard her several times attempt to snub her father, and once I noted how she spent a whole evening in moody silence, and refused to play a note, for no other reason that I could see except that Captain ARBLAST, of the 30th Lancers, the dashing first-born of the Bishop, who happened to be spending a few days of his long leave in Archester, devoted himself with all the assiduity of his military nature to twirling his heavy moustache in the immediate neighbourhood of SOPHY MAYBLOOM, and not in that of HERMIONE. Indeed, I have reason to know that, after the guests had departed, poor SOPHY had to endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have not yet faded from her memory. And then I remembered, too, how it was a matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and mottled, and she imagined that she would never be able to wear a low dress, or shine in Society.

Such, then, was the beautiful HERMIONE, who for some years rode rough-shod over the hearts of all the males in Archester. Space fails me to enumerate all her engagements. She broke them one after another without a thought, and cast her admirers away as if they had been dresses of last year's fashion. Most of them, it must be said, recovered quickly enough, but the miserable COPE became a hopeless hypochondriac, and never smiled again. He died the other day, and HERMIONE's sketch of HANKINSON was found, frayed and soiled, in an ancient pocket-book which he always carried about with him. HANKINSON'S fate seemed at first to be worse. He took to poetry, morbid, passionate, yearning, unhealthy poetry, of the skimmed SWINBURNE variety, and for a time was gloomy enough. Having, however, engaged in a paper conflict with one of his critics, he forgot his sorrows, and though he still declares an overwhelming desire for death and oblivion about six times a year, in various magazines, he seemed, when I last saw him, fairly comfortable and happy. But, of course, he has never secured a vicarage.

Then suddenly came the crash. She left her husband, in company with CHARLIE FITZHUBERT, the heir presumptive to the wealthy earldom of Battersea. On the following day Mr. PARDOE blew out his brains, leaving ten thousand pounds of debt and three young children. Six months afterwards the venerable Dean died, and sentimental people spoke of a broken heart. Then the Earl of BATTERSEA, in a fit of indignation, married, and was blessed with a son, the present Earl. CHARLIE FITZHUBERT married HERMIONE, but they are as poor as curates, and he hates her. I saw her two days ago in a shabby hired carriage. She is getting prematurely old, and grey, and wrinkled, and everybody avoids her, except her sister SOPHY, who still visits her, and suffers her ill-humour.

Charming story, isn't it? I shall write again soon.

Yours, in the meantime, DIOGENES ROBINSON.

NIGHT-MAILING.--"Night Mail between London and Paris" has been recently announced in all the papers as now ready and willing to take night-mailers from Victoria, L.C. & D., to the French Capital. It is to be a Third-class Night Mail, though a Knight of the First Class can, of course, travel by it should he be so disposed. Thirty shillings through fare for "a single;" but as the tariff doesn't explicitly inform us whether the passenger will be asked the question, "Married or single?" and so be charged accordingly, we may presume that a margin is left for a little surprise. The train of Night Mails--a kind of gay bachelor train, no females being of the party--is to start at 8:15 P.M., and to be in Paris at 5:50 A.M.

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