, full toilet for this evening,--pink,
diamonds, and emeralds. Coiffeur at seven. Allez."--Billionism, or
even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with health and clear
conscience and youth and good looks,--but most blessed is this, that it
takes off all the mean cares which give people the three wrinkles between
the eyebrows, and leaves them free to have a good time and make others
have a good time, all the way along from the charity that tips up
unexpected loads of wood before widows' houses, and leaves foundling
turkeys upon poor men's door-steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at the
sight of anonymous fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a
perfect banquet in such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's
nature flowers out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant
atmosphere.

--A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind of
solemnity, so to speak. It involves so much labor and anxiety,--its
spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of
every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter to break in the
raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,--there is
such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary
operations,--so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which
divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local
universe,--that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests'
company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly express the
true state of things.

The Colonel himself had been pressed into the service. He had pounded
something in the great mortar. He had agitated a quantity of sweetened
and thickened milk in what was called a cream-freezer. At eleven
o'clock, A. M., he retired for a space. On returning, his color was
noted to be somewhat heightened, and he showed a disposition to be
jocular with the female help,--which tendency, displaying itself in
livelier demonstrations than were approved at head-quarters, led to his
being detailed to out-of-door duties, such as raking gravel, arranging
places for horses to be hitched to, and assisting in the construction of
an arch of wintergreen at the porch of the mansion.

A whiff from Mr. Geordie's cigar refreshed the toiling females from time
to time; for the windows had to be opened occasionally, while all these
operations were going on, and the youth amused himself with inspecting
the interior, encour