If the stranger in New York, on any pleasant day, finds himself near
Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage he will be in the midst of a very
pretty scene. Perhaps as he reads these words and asks the question
where that romantic cot may be found, he is comfortably seated in it,
with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is, indeed,
in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of
fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale
Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's
Bay. It had an indefinable road-side English air in those far-off
mornings. The early citizen would not have been surprised had he heard
the horn of the guard merrily winding, and beheld the mail-coach of
old England bowling up to the door. There were fields and open spaces
about it, for it was on the edge of the city that was already reaching
out upon the island. Bloomingdale! Twas a lovely name, and 'tis a
great pity that the chief association with it is that of a very dusty
road.
Meanwhile, if you will contemplate the Fifth Avenue Hotel you will see
Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage in its present form. But what a
busy, brilliant neighborhood it is now! There are shops that recall
the prettiest upon the boulevards in Paris; and the people are greatly
to be pitied who are too fine to stop and look into them. To be too
fine is to lose much. Yet what scion of the golden youth of this
moment would dare to walk by the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway
Cottage eating an apple at three o'clock in the afternoon?
There was a grave and well-dressed gentleman who stopped recently at
the stand of Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan, which is just in the midst of
the gay promenade, to transact some business in peanut candy. The
interest of the public in that operation was inconceivable. If he had
been Mr. Vanderbilt buying out Mr. Astor--if he had been a lunatic
astray from the asylum, or a clown escaped from the circus--he could
hardly have excited more attention. The passengers stared in
amazement. Some young gentlemen, escorting certain young ladies from
school, cracked excellent jokes upon the honest buyer of peanut candy;
and if his daughter or any friend had chanced to pass and had seen
him, she would probably have been seriously troubled and half ashamed.
Now peanut candy is very good, and at Mrs. M'Patrick O'Finnigan's
stand it is very cheap. Nobody is ashamed of liking it, nor of eating
it. If the grave gentleman had stepped into Caswell's brilliant shop,
let us suppose--where, perhaps, it is also sold--and had called for
that particular sweet, nobody would have stared nor made a joke nor
felt that it was extraordinary. Yet, how many of the brave generals in
the war, who charged in the very face of flaming batteries, would dare
to stop at Mrs. O'Finnigan's and buy ten cents' worth of peanut candy
if they saw Mrs. Sweller's carriage approaching, or Miss Dasher just
coming upon the walk? And as for the Misses Spanker, who daily drive
in that superb open wagon with yellow wheels, and who resemble nothing
so much as the figures in a Parisian doll-carriage, if they saw an
admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they
would not know him--they would no more bow to a man so lost to all the
finer sense of the _comme il faut_ than they would nod to a
street-sweeper. It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon some
human beings of the tender sex by clothing them in silks cut in a
certain form, and seating them in a high wooden box on yellow wheels.
And upon us, also. When the Easy Chair beholds the silken Misses
Spanker rolling by, superior, upon those yellow wheels, it is with
difficulty that it recalls the cheese and sausage from which all that
splendor springs. To-morrow it will be Mrs. O'Finnigan's grandchildren
who will look down from their yellow wheels at the peanut and apple
stands, and wonder how persons can be so vulgar as to buy candy in the
streets. It is a whim of Mrs. Grundy's, who is all whimsey. She will
not let us buy a piece of simple candy at the corner, but she will
allow us to drag a silk dress over the garbage of the pavement. 'Tis a
whimsical sovereign. But we are so carefully trained that it is not
easy to disobey her. If to prove your independence you should stop to
buy the candy, would the pleasure of asserting yourself balance the
unpleasant consciousness that you were wondered at and laughed at?
But the text was shops, and we have drifted into this episode because
Mrs. O'Finnigan sells peanut candy in her shop upon the sidewalk near
the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage, in the midst of the
gay spectacle of a summer day. And within a stone's-toss of her stand
how many fine houses you will see, and how many other fascinating
shops! Our English ancestors were called a shopkeeping nation by
Napoleon; but it is his own Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who have the
true secret of shopkeeping. They make shops fascinating. They have
made shopkeeping a fine art. The other day the Easy Chair stepped into
a shop in Maiden Lane, prepared to spend a very pretty sum of money,
for a very proper purpose. But if it had invaded the shopkeeper's
house, which is his castle, or threatened his hat, which is his crown,
it could not have been received more coolly. The disdainful
indifference with which its question was answered was exquisitely
comical; and the shopkeeper proceeded to look for what was required
with a superb carelessness, and an air of utter weariness and disgust
of this incessant doing of favors to the most undeserving and
insignificant people. It was plainly an act of pure grace that the
Easy Chair was not instantly shot into the street as rubbish, or given
in charge to the police as a common vagabond.
This worthy attendant--doubtless very estimable in his private
capacity--is a serious injury to the business which he is supposed to
help. He does not in the least understand his profession. Let an Easy
Chair advise him to run over the sea to Paris, and observe how they
keep shop in that capital. Does he want a cravat? Here is a houri,
neatly dressed, evidently long waiting for him especially, and eager
to serve him. "Is it a cravat that Monsieur wishes? Charming! The most
ravishing styles are just ready! Is it blue, or this, or that, that
Monsieur prefers? Monsieur's taste is perfect. Look! It is a miracle
of beauty that he selects. Will he permit?" And before you know it,
you foolish fellow, who don't understand the first principle of your
calling--before you know it, she has thrown it around your neck, she
has tied it deftly under your chin, and that pretty face is looking
into yours, and that pleasant voice is saying, "Nothing could be
better. It is the most smiling effect possible!" You might as well
hope to escape the sirens, as to go from under those hands without
buying that cravat.
This is shopkeeping, and a little study of the art, as thus practised,
would be of the utmost service to the Easy Chair's friend in Maiden
Lane. The shops there are pretty, and especially during the holidays
they are glittering, but they are a little cold and formal. The air of
the Boulevards is to be detected only in the neighborhood of Corporal
Thompson's Broadway Cottage. Whether cravats are there wafted around
the buyer's neck, as it were, entangling him hopelessly in silken and
satin webs, the Easy Chair does not know. But it can believe it, as it
passes by upon the outside, and beholds the windows which Paris could
hardly surpass. Through those windows it sees that, as in Paris, the
attendants are often women. It is thereby reminded that in Paris the
women are among the most accomplished accountants also; and it
remembers that in the same city men are cooks. It is very sure that
when Madame Welles, who was afterwards the Marchioness De Lavalette,
became at the death of her husband the head of the great
banking-house, her cook was a man.
And thereupon the Easy Chair falls into meditation upon "the sphere"
of the sexes, and asks itself, as it loiters about the site of the
Broadway Cottage, admiring the pretty shops, whether, if it be womanly
for woman to keep shop and to acquire property by her faithful
industry, it can be manly for man to make laws appropriating and using
her property without her consent?