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Social Life in Old New Orleans; Being Recollections of My Girlhood
Social Life in Old New Orleans Being Recollections of My Girlhood Author:Eliza Ripley General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1912 Original Publisher: D. Appleton and Company Subjects: New Orleans (La.) Louisiana Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get fr... more »ee trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Ill BOARDING SCHOOL IN THE FORTIES I WONDER if the parents of the present do not sometimes contrast the fashionable schools in which their daughters are being educated with the fashionable schools to which their aged mothers, mayhap grandmothers, were sent sixty and more years ago? Among my possessions that I keep -- according to the dictum of my grandchildren -- "for sentimental sake," is a much-worn "Scholar's Companion," which they scorn to look at when I bring it forth, and explain it to be the best speller that ever was; and a bent, much overworked crochet needle of my schooldays, for we worked with our hands as well as with our brains. The boarding school to which I refer was not unique, but a typical / New England seminary of the forties. It was both fashionable and popular, but the young ladies were not, as now, expected to appear at a 6 o'clock dinner in a low neck (oh, my!) gown. Lately, passing through the now much expanded city to which I was sent, such a young girl, on asailing ship from New Orleans to New York in the early spring of 1847, I spent a half hour walking on Crown Street looking for No. in. It was not there, not a trace of the building of my day left; nor was one, so far as I know, of the girls, my old schoolmates, left; all three of the dear, painstaking teachers sleeping in the old cemetery, at rest at last were they. Every blessed one lives in my memory, bright and young, patient and middle-aged -- all are here to beguile my twilight hours The school routine was simple and precise, especi...« less