was held the first masked ball ever given in New York. It was, to quote
Mr. George S. Hellman, "the most splendid social affair of the first
half of the nineteenth century." But it was also the last masked ball
held in the town for many years.

The name of the British Consul to New York at the time was Anthony
Barclay, and he had a daughter. Her name was Matilda; she is described
as having been a belle of great charm and beauty, and as having had a
number of suitors. Of course, after the fashion of all love stories, the
suitor favoured by her was the one of whom her parents most disapproved.
He was a young South Carolinian named Burgwyne. Opposition served only
to fan the flame, and the lovers met by stealth, and the gay Southerner
wooed the fair Briton in the good old school poetical manner. In soft
communion of fancy they wandered together to far lands; to:

"that delightful Province of the Sun,
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
Flow'rets and fruits, blush over every stream,
And, fairest of all streams, the Murga roves
Among Merou's bright palaces and groves."

It was "Tom" Moore's "Lalla Rookh" that was dearest to their hearts.
Then came the great masked ball, to which practically all "society" was
invited.

Matilda and Burgwyne agreed to go in the guise of their romantic
favourites; she as Lalla Rookh, and he as Feramorz, the young Prince.
She wore "floating gauzes, bracelets, a small coronet of jewels, and a
rose-coloured bridal veil." His dress was "simple, yet not without marks
of costliness, with a high Tartarian cap, and strings of pearls hanging
from his flowered girdle of Kaskan." Till four o'clock in the morning
they danced. Then, still wearing the costumes of the romantic poem, they
slipped away from the ball and were married before breakfast. It seems
quite harmless, and natural, and as it should have been, when we regard
it after all the years. But it caused a great uproar and scandal at the
time, and brought masked balls into such odium that there was, a bit
later, a fine of one thousand dollars imposed on anyone who should give
one,--one-half to be deducted in case you told on yourself.

There is a little magazine published in New York designed to entertain
and instruct those who view from the top of a bus of one of the various
lines that are the outgrowth of the old Fifth Avenue stage line. The
magazine is called