The Drum Beat/Number 10/Letter from a Boston Lady at Home
LETTER FROM A BOSTON LADY AT HOME.
Boston, Feb. 27, 1864.
Mr. Editor: I have just read the "Drum Beat" of Feb. 24th, which proclaims the auspicious opening of the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair. I knew the culture, public spirit, and patriotism of your city well enough to predict that these Fair Days would be a succession of triumphs, as the sequel is proving.
But I must confess myself shocked at the exhibition of the taste of Brooklyn people. "Our Daily Record" in the Drum Beat of this date, is almost entirely devoted to the details of the Restaurant.
First, we have a disquisition upon cake, which is light, delicate, and spicy, as its subject. Next, a critique, refined and elaborate, upon the saccharine creations of Knickerbocker Hall, which so captivates us by its sweet imagery, that we begin at once to calculate how a statue of General Banks, or General Butler, would look cast in sugar (brown sugar, of course,) and placed in our State House grounds, to match the bronze statue of Webster. But suddenly (no aeronaut ever experienced a greater shock in falling from a balloon to a bog?) we are precipitated, statue and all, from the realm of "High Art and Sugar" to the "Restaurant doors, which had to be closed, so great was the rush for food!" Pray tell me, have your good people been keeping Lent for the last six months? or have all the Libby prisoners suddenly been let loose upon you? I trust that a Bread-riot is not imminent; that these surging crowds will not prove mutinous, and in their fierce iconoclastic rage demolish the fair idols of Lowber's temple! I would modestly hint, that if the sumptuary aspect of your Fair continues unchanged, the labors of the Sanitary Commission might be made serviceable at home.
As a relief to the Record cited above, I read "The Autograph Collection." This was very happily sandwiched, as a relish, between the record and a notice (which at once put to rest all my fears for your ability to supply the physical) announcing the sale, by order of the Refreshment Committee, of a pair of "Devon Steers, live weight four thousand three hundred pounds," etc. That will do! If you have such "baskets full of fragments left," after treating your thousands to a barbecue, I think you will be able to keep open doors for the rest of the Fair season.
Yours aesthetically,
Tremont.