5 June 1858

FRESH FERN LEAVES.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by ROBERT BONNER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

WHY I LIKE NEW YORK.

New York, with all thy faults, I love thee still; and yet thy long-suffering pavements know thou never art still! Yes, I love thy rush, and hurry, and clatter, and din; it sounds as if the world was really "going round," as the geographers tell us, which a sojourn in Boston might tempt one to doubt. It suits my restless moods, though I must say I prefer my bed to be located in Brooklyn. I don't always find myself frowning when the impudent omnibusses coolly take off the hind wheel from the smaller fry, never turning a head to hear the ripping anathemas launched after them. I like the distant whiz of the breathless cars. I like the booming of cannon, announcing a steamer's arrival, which comes to us on every breeze. I like the slap-dash, pell-mell rush of the fire-engines, round corners, and through throughfares, regardless of every description of puppy and nondescript young kittens. The impudent persistence of thy beggars amuseth me, with their stock of blessings and curses ready to order, according to the generosity, penuriousness, or indifference of the listener; also the horse-leech cry of the venders of small wares; also the street "ballads," festooning park gates and railing, or held down by stones to counteract their exceeding lightness. Thy sprinkling of priests and dandies is funny. Thy Babylonish women also, bloated with high living, nothing to do, and no place to do it in. Thy vivacious little school-girls—the nature, not yet "moral science"-d out of all of them—more bewitching with their shining hair, plain collars, and satchels, than all the after-trickeries of fashion can make them. Thy jaded editors and merchants, to whom one must give a wide berth as they pass home up-town to dinner—the very incarnation of jack-knives, east-wind, and vinegar; but how radiant in the evening at opera or concert, like all their sex after that male quietus—a good feed! (N.B)—No wife, who knows anything, will ask a favor of her husband at any less auspicious moment.—Thy stylish equipages, with their liveried coachmen, and anything but patrician-looking occupants. Thy opera's, and theater's, and minstrel's, and mammoth women—the latter shown at twenty-five cents a head; like wise skeleton men; likewise learned pigs. Thy long-tailed, humbugging Chinamen, bent double on the sidewalk, with intense scrutiny of their toes, meantime drawing sympathy and coppers from un-sophisticated "green-horns." Thy bewitching shop-windows, which wise husbands never pass in company with their wives. Thy surfeit of church-steeples and dentists. (N.B.)—How is it that dentists are generally handsome?—Thy heterogeneous, panoramic mixing-up of races and cos-tumes. Thy better than Babel-confusion of tongues. Good gracious! how refreshing to rush plump into the maelstrom, and sink one's self; to shut one's mental eyes, and be borne carelessly off on the current of the hour, ignoring the musquito-stinging cares, annoyances, disgusts, perplexities, aye, even responsibilities, from which our overcharged hearts need an escape valve.

Heaven help the excitable wretch, doomed to vegetate like a turnip in the sleepy hum-drum-ness of a country village, with its one town-pump, its one blacksmith's shop, its one fire-engine, and its one desolate "meeting-house"—and that always perched on an arid sand-bank, forty miles at least from any green thing, save the sexton.

FANNY FERN.