From Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 75 Issue 450 (November 1887)
“On a Fly-Leaf of a Book of Old Plays,” by Mr. Walter Learned, is a pretty picture, done with touch. “Her First Train,” by Mr. A. E. Watrous, is also prettily picturesque, and also touchful; and “Her Bonnet,” by Miss Mary E. Wilkins (she of the Humble Romance, and Other Stories, we suppose), is very arch and neat and demurely humorous:
“When meeting-bells began to toll,
And pious folk began to pass,
She deftly tied her bonnet on,
The little, sober, meeting lass,
All in her neat, white-curtained room, before her looking-glass. …
“So square she tied the satin strings,
And set the bows beneath her chin!
Then smiled to see how sweet she looked;
Then thought her vanity a sin,
And she must put such thoughts away before the sermon should begin. …
“Yet sitting there with peaceful face,
The reflex of her simple soul,
She looked to be a very saint —
And maybe was one, on the whole —
Only that her pretty bonnet kept away the aureole.”
In fact, if it were not for fear of being thought a flatterer of the sex, we should say that not only for the finer humor, but for the broader fun, the ladies have the best of it in this collection of society verse.
