The story of the butcher who looked out in the soft summer moonlight and
announced that something ought to be done on so fine a night, and he
guessed he would go out and "slarter," was told to Melissa, who
ejaculated pretty ohs and ahs, and said, "But how vulgar." Yet had some
dreadful Nathan heard the words, and beheld Melissa as she spoke, he
would have raised his voice and pointed his finger and said, "Thou art
the woman!" For the delicate Melissa was the wearer of dead birds in her
hat, and encouraged the "slarter" of the loveliest and sweetest of
innocent song-birds merely to gratify her vanity. The butcher, madam,
may be vulgar, but at least he does not kill in order to wear the horns
and tails of his victims.
"How hideous!" exclaims Belinda, as she sees the pictured head of the
savage islander, "rings in his nose! how hideous!" And the gentle
Belinda shakes the rings in her ears in protest against such barbarism.
Sylvia, too, laughs gayly at the wife of the Chinese ambassador stumping
along upon invisible feet; and Sylvia would laugh more freely except for
her invisible waist. "It is so preposterous to squeeze your feet," she
remarks; "it is a deformity, it outrages nature;" and the superb and
benignant Venus of Milo smiles from her pedestal in the corner, and with
her eyes fixed upon Sylvia's waist, echoes Sylvia's words, "It is a
deformity, it outrages nature."
The Puritan preacher who, somewhat perverting his text, cried, "Topknot,
come down!" declared war upon the innocent ribbons that, carefully
trained and twisted and exalted into a towering ornament, doubtless
nodded from the head of Priscilla to the heart of John Alden and melted
it completely, while the preacher could not even catch his wandering
eyes. The preacher's course was clear. Topknots must come down if they
allured to a sweeter worship than he inculcated. But those ribbons were
made for that pretty purpose of adornment; they were not victims. They
silenced no song; they hardened no heart; they rewarded no wanton
cruelty; they destroyed no charm of the field or wood. They were not
memorials of heartless slaughter. They were simply devices by which
maidenly charms were heightened, and a little grace and taste and beauty
lent to the sombre Puritan world.
But the topknots of to-day are bought at a monstrous price. Carlyle says
of certain enormous fire-flies on an island of the East Indies that,
placed upon poles, they illuminate the journeys of distinguished people
by night. "Great honor to the fire-flies!" he exclaims; "but--" It is a
great honor to the golden-winged woodpecker to be shot and then daintily
poised upon the hat of Cyrilla as, enveloped in a cloud of dudes, she
promenades the Avenue on Sunday afternoon; great honor to the
woodpecker; but--The naughty dog in the country who hunts and kills
chickens is made to wear a dead chicken hung around his neck, and is at
last shamed out of his murderous fancy. How if Cyrilla, strolling in the
summer fields, haply with young Laurence hanging enthralled upon her
sweet eyes, her low replies, should chance to meet the cur disgraced
with the dead chicken hung around his neck, she with the dead woodpecker
upon her head!
The lovely lady puts a premium upon wanton slaughter and unspeakable
cruelty. She incites the murderous small boy and all the idlers and
vagrants to share and shoot the singing bird, and silence the heavenly
music of the summer air. She cries for "slarter," and, like the white
cat enchanted into the Princess, who leaps to the floor in hot chase
when the mouse appears, the Queen of Beauty, with a feathered corpse for
a crown, begins to seem even to Laurence unhappily enchanted.