第67章

I have said the B.L.had another child.Now this was a little girl of some six years old, as fair and as smooth of skin, dear madam, as your own darling cherubs.She wandered about the great cabin quite melancholy.No one seemed to care for her.All the family affections were centred on Master Esau yonder.His little beard was beginning to be a little fortune already, whereas Miss Rosalba was of no good to the family.No one would pay a cent to see HER little fair face.No wonder the poor little maid was melancholy.As Ilooked at her, I seemed to walk more and more in a fairy tale, and more and more in a cavern of ogres.Was this a little fondling whom they had picked up in some forest, where lie the picked bones of the queen, her tender mother, and the tough old defunct monarch, her father? No.Doubtless they were quite good-natured people, these.

I don't believe they were unkind to the little girl without the moustaches.It may have been only my fancy that she repined because she had a cheek no more bearded than a rose's.

Would you wish your own daughter, madam, to have a smooth cheek, a modest air, and a gentle feminine behavior, or to be--I won't say a whiskered prodigy, like this Bearded Lady of Kentucky--but a masculine wonder, a virago, a female personage of more than female strength, courage, wisdom? Some authors, who shall be nameless, are, I know, accused of depicting the most feeble, brainless, namby-pamby heroines, for ever whimpering tears and prattling commonplaces.

YOU would have the heroine of your novel so beautiful that she should charm the captain (or hero, whoever he may be) with her appearance; surprise and confound the bishop with her learning;outride the squire and get the brush, and, when he fell from his horse, whip out a lancet and bleed him; rescue from fever and death the poor cottager's family whom the doctor had given up; make 21 at the butts with the rifle, when the poor captain only scored 18; give him twenty in fifty at billiards and beat him; and draw tears from the professional Italian people by her exquisite performance (of voice and violoncello) in the evening;--I say, if a novelist would be popular with ladies--the great novel-readers of the world--this is the sort of heroine who would carry him through half a dozen editions.Suppose I had asked that Bearded Lady to sing? Confess, now, miss, you would not have been displeased if I had told you that she had a voice like Lablache, only ever so much lower.

My dear, you would like to be a heroine? You would like to travel in triumphal caravans; to see your effigy placarded on city walls;to have your levees attended by admiring crowds, all crying out, "Was there ever such a wonder of a woman?" You would like admiration? Consider the tax you pay for it.You would be alone were you eminent.Were you so distinguished from your neighbors Iwill not say by a beard and whiskers, that were odious--but by a great and remarkable intellectual superiority--would you, do you think, be any the happier? Consider envy.Consider solitude.

Consider the jealousy and torture of mind which this Kentucky lady must feel, suppose she should hear that there is, let us say, a Missouri prodigy, with a beard larger than hers? Consider how she is separated from her kind by the possession of that wonder of a beard? When that beard grows gray, how lonely she will be, the poor old thing! If it falls off, the public admiration falls off too;and how she will miss it--the compliments of the trumpeters, the admiration of the crowd, the gilded progress of the car.I see an old woman alone in a decrepit old caravan, with cobwebs on the knocker, with a blistered ensign flapping idly over the door.Would you like to be that deserted person? Ah, Chloe! To be good, to be simple, to be modest, to be loved, be thy lot.Be thankful thou art not taller, nor stronger, nor richer, nor wiser than the rest of the world!