Page:Foreign Tales and Traditions (Volume 2).djvu/229

wherever you go nothing is talked of at Klarenburg but the rich young councillor; every one is teazing another about him, and every one is dreadfully afraid lest she should not prove the fortunate one. He is expected one of these days, and the dress-makers and milliners have been at work already for weeks, for every one is wanting to show herself to the best possible advantage, and aunts and mothers have been racking their inventions from morn to noon, and noon to night, and night to morn, planning how best to entrap this rare young goldfinch for a daughter or niece. I cannot tell you how much amusement all this has afforded me! Not long ago I overheard the following reproof administered to a nice looking young woman: ‘But dear me, Augusta, how can you stoop so odiously! Depend upon it if the councillor comes, and you look so humpbacked as you are doing just now, he will never turn his eye upon you!’—Again: ‘Oh, Frederica, you shock me! These toes of yours—can’t you turn them out! Do you think that if the councillor should chance to see you waddling that way like a duck, he would ever look at you again?’—It was only yesterday I heard our captain of militia’s wife calling out to her daughter: ‘Susan, Susan, how many hundred times must I reprove you for that horrid custom you have fallen into of squinting! Why, do you think that the young gentleman when he comes, will not instantly turn his back upon you, when he sees you ogling his hand with one eye, and his foot with the other at the same moment!’—It is currently reported that the young heir speaks French remarkably well: so there is such a parlezvouing, and chattering in every house from morning to night, as makes your ears tingle all the time you are within hearing. Some again have heard that the councillor is a great proficient in music, and so you cannot walk from one end of a street to another without having your ears stunned with such a rattling of pianos, thrumbing of guitars, and twanging of harps, and screaming of songs, French, German, and Italian, as would