Letter to Henry Ward Beecher
“There has been a very jolly set of children in my house since the box [of mixed candies] came. I have made a scientific analysis with such means as I had at hand—my tongue and palate—and am of opinion that it is pure, and am sure that it is good (I know that Fanny Fern is sorry that she ever wrote a word against candy, and stands pouting, to think that I have all the sweets on my side).”—Mr. Beecher in N. Y. Ledger.
Pouting? Not a bit of it. After I make up my mind a thing is past being helped, I always turn my giant mind to something else.
Now, “your riverence,” your love for “sweets” is not a thing of yesterday. I mind me of a young man, of your name, who once came to a boarding-school, where I, at sixteen, was placed for algebra and safe-keeping, both of which I hated, and who invited me to take several surreptitious rides with him, which I did; and which will probably first come to the knowledge of his sister, my teacher, through this number of the New York Ledger. What Plymouth church has escaped, in the way of an infliction, by that young man’s going to college about that time, and my return to the “bosom of my family,” to learn the “Lost Arts,” bread-making and button-hole stitching, Plymouth church may now for the first time learn.
And now, having paid you off for your little public dig at me, I proceed magnanimously to admit, that I believe a bit of pure candy, given to a child as dessert after a wholesome meal, is perfectly harmless. But not even the gifted pastor of Plymouth church, whose sermons, to me, are like a spring of water in the desert, can ever make me believe that an indiscriminate nibble of even pure candy between meals is good for any child.
Now, Mr. Beecher, we are both grandfathers—I mean, you are a grandfather, and I am a grandmother. I now propose to pit my grandchild against yours on the candy question, and see which, in the future, brings us the heaviest dentist and doctor’s bills. We won’t scratch each other’s eyes out now, both on account of “auld lang syne,” and on account of the dignity of our position—I mean the dignity of yours.
I have one thing against you besides candy, and that is, that I can never get a seat at your church. As everybody is giving you advice, of which, by the way, I too have plenty, I advise you to remove to New York, that I may be able, without getting up in the middle of the night in order to cross the ferry, to get a seat in one of your pews. You have been in Brooklyn now for a long time, and if the people over there haven’t yet become angels, it is high time you tried your hand on the other kind in New York.
I propose the site of the present Bible House, as being a nice walk from my residence, which is the main thing to be considered. I will agree to find your pulpit in flowers—(not of oratory; that is for you!)
Hoping that you will be able to turn from your beloved box of candy to an early consideration of this question, I am—leaving out candy—
Your faithful adherent, Fanny Fern.
One Kind of Fool.—It is very instructive sometimes, at a place of country resort, to watch the woman who has come only to exhibit her changes of wardrobe. For a day or two, possibly longer, she goes through her solitary dress-rehearsals. Finding at last that the rest of the boarders wear rubbers and water-proofs, and live out of doors in all weathers, the woman who came to dress, gets weary of waiting for admirers, and reluctantly joins the sensible majority, rather than be left alone; but generally with an apologetic, “How odd it seems, not to dress for dinner as one does in the city,” by way of letting herself gently down from her snobbish pedestal. We are happy to add, however, that the number of women who go into the country to dress is becoming fewer every year; folly in this regard having reached its ultimatum of loathsomeness.