Chapter XXXII: A Letter to the True Flag

Next get into the habit of writing letters to your female
acquaintances, which will draw from them replies; from both
of which sources you will in time learn enough of female
vanity and sentimentality to form the ground-work of a
love-story.--_True Flag_, No. 39.

Dear Mr. True Flag:--I'm appointed 'a committee of one,' to inquire _who_ perpetrated that sentiment in your last week's paper? _Trot him out!_ please, and let me put my two eyes on him; and if _looking_ will annihilate him, there shan't be anything left for the undertaker to shovel up. I'm _indignant, very_! and what's more; _I don't like it_!

"'_Female vanity and sentimentality!_' Oh, Delilah, Dolly, Julia, Jane, Agnes, Amelia, Kathleen, Kitty, your letters fell into the hands of the Philistines, and _that's_ their epitaph!

"'_Female vanity and sentimentality!_' _O-o-h!_ May you never have a string to your dickey, or a dickey to your string! button to your coat, or a pair of _whole_ gloves or stockings. May you sit in a state of utter inconsolability over your unswept, untidy hearth, and bachelor fire. May you never have a soft place to lay your head when it aches; no nice little hand to magnetize away the blue devils; nobody to jump up on a cricket and tie your neck-cloth in a pretty little bow! No bright eyes to look proudly out the window after you when you go down to the store! no pretty little feet to trip to the door to meet you when you come back! May your coffee be smoky, your toast burnt, your tea be _water-bewitched_; your razor grow dull, your moustache _turn the wrong way!_ your boots be '_corned!_' your lips be innocent of a kiss from this day, henceforward and forever; and may you die a cantankerous, crusty, captious, companionless, musty, fusty _old Benedict_! Amen!

"FANNY FERN.

"P. S.--If he's _handsome_, dear Mr. Flag, we'll remove the anathema, and let him off with a slight reprimand, under promise of better behavior.

"F. F."