ey grow slovenly in dress, and
wear the same hat forever. They have a feeble curiosity for news
perhaps, which they take daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall
silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this
regimen, like a fire without a draught; and it is not very strange, if
the instinct of mental self-preservation drives them to brandy-and-water,
which makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for a few brief moments,
and puts a weak leer of promise on the features of the hollow-eyed
future. The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet by his wife, and
though it had happened to him once or twice to come home rather late at
night with a curious tendency to say the same thing twice and even three
times over, it had always been in very cold weather,--and everybody knows
that no one is safe to drink a couple of glasses of wine in a warm room
and go suddenly out into the cold air.

Miss Matilda Sprowle, sole daughter of the house, had reached the age at
which young ladies are supposed in technical language to have come out,
and thereafter are considered to be in company.

"There's one piece o' goods," said the Colonel to his wife, "that we
ha'n't disposed of, nor got a customer for yet. That 's Matildy. I
don't mean to set HER up at vaandoo. I guess she can have her pick of a
dozen."

"She 's never seen anybody yet," said Mrs. Sprowle, who had had a certain
project for some time, but had kept quiet about it. "Let's have a party,
and give her a chance to show herself and see some of the young folks."

The Colonel was not very clear-headed, and he thought, naturally enough,
that the party was his own suggestion, because his remark led to the
first starting of the idea. He entered into the plan, therefore, with a
feeling of pride as well as pleasure, and the great project was resolved
upon in a family council without a dissentient voice. This was the
party, then, to which Mr. Bernard was going. The town had been full of it
for a week. "Everybody was asked." So everybody said that was invited.
But how in respect of those who were not asked? If it had been one of
the old mansion-houses that was giving a party, the boundary between the
favored and the slighted families would have been known pretty well
beforehand, and there would have been no great amount of grumbling. But
the Colonel, for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a
brushwood swamp of shabby friends, fo