" Holiday Week drew near,
when, as Miss CAROWTHERS Ritually expressed it, "all who were true
believers of the American Church of England in their hearts would softly
celebrate the devout Yearly Festival of Apostolic Christianity, by
decking the Only True Church with symbolical evergreens over places
where the paint was scratched off, and receiving New Year's Calls
without intoxicating liquors." In honor of this approaching solemn
season of peace on earth, good will to young men, the discipline of
Macassar Female College was slightly relaxed: Bible-studies were no
longer rigorously inflicted as a punishment for criminal absence of all
punctuation from English Composition, and any Young Lady whose father
was good pay could actually sneeze in her teacup without being locked
into her own room on bread-and-water until she was truly penitent for
her sin and wished she was a Christian. Consequently, an air of unusual
license pervaded the Alms-House; woman's rights meetings were held at
the heads of stairways to declare, that, whereas MARY AMANDA PARKINSON'S
male second-cousin has promised to meet her at the railroad station, and
thereby made her pretend to us that the letter was from her father, when
all the time ANN LOUISA BAKER accidentally caught sight of the words "My
Precious MOLLY" while looking for her scissors in the wrong drawer, and
therefore, be it Resolved, that we wish he knew about one shoulder being
a little higher than the other, (as she _knows_ the dressmaker told
her,) and about that one red whisker under the left hand corner of her
chin which she might as well stop trying to keep cut off; dark
assemblages resembling walking lobsters were convened in special
dormitories at night, to compare brothers and tell how they Byronically
said that they never should care for women again after what they had
sacrificed for them in the horse-cars without so much as a "Thank you,
sir," but if they ever _could_ be brought to liking a girl now, it would
be on account of her not pretending to care for anything but money and a
husband's early grave; and very white parties of pleasure were organized
in the halls, at ghostly hours, to go down to the cupboard for a
mince-pie under pretense of hearing burglars, and subsequently to drink
the mince-pie from curl-papers, accompanied by whispers of "H'sh! don't
eat the crust so loud, or Miss CAROWTHERS 'll think it's a man.
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