To Miss Anna Loring.
Wayland, December 10, 1857.
I wanted very much to introduce to you a baby I met in the cars.
She was a fat little thing, not two years old, but as quick as a steel-trap.
She was on the opposite side of the cars, but insisted upon trying to stretch her short fat arm across to me, with her hand open, repeating, “How do?”
“I am pretty well,” said I.
“How do you do?”
“Mart” (smart), was her quick reply.
And this scene she wanted to enact every five minutes, to the great amusement of those around her. At last a little boy came in, about a year older than herself, and was placed on the seat behind her. Feeling the necessity of keeping up the character of her sex for propriety, she took a good deal of trouble to get at him, and push him, saying, “You do 'way!
You do 'way!”
The boy, who seemed to be as timid as she was t “mart,” shrunk himself up as close as possible, probably having a prophetic sense of the position it becomes his sex to assume, if they regard their own safety, in these days when women are getting to be so “mart.”
At last he climbed the seat and turned his back to her. . .
[95]
She could not stand being taken no notice of. So she swung her little fat person over the back of her seat, to the imminent peril of falling, and began to poke at him, calling out, “Boy!
Boy!”
He completely withdrew her attention from me. But I could n't help watching her, she was such a funny little impersonation of human nature.
I fell to moralizing, thinking to myself what a cheerful world it would be if we all ignored ranks and sexes and sects and barriers of all sorts, and went about with open palm outstretched to everybody, saying, “How do?”
If we could only do that, the world's answer would always be, “Mart.”
