sively to them. Do, Colonel
L'Isle, take pity on a dumb woman, and lend me a Portuguese tongue."
And gliding off among a party of the natives present, she entered into
conversation with them, calling continually on L'Isle to interlard her
complimentary scraps with more copious and better turned periods.

Mrs. Shortridge, too, kept her interpreter, the commissary, close at
her elbow, and the quantity of uncurrent Portuguese she made him utter
to her guests, in the course of the night, amounted to a wholesale
issue of the counterfeit coin of that tongue. From the assiduity of
both ladies in courting the natives, one might have thought that they
meant to settle at Elvas, or that they were rival candidates
canvassing the borough for votes.

It was a young and gay party assembled here, and Mrs. Shortridge's
floor was soon covered with dancers. In private houses the national
dances are often executed in a modified and less demonstrative style,
at least early in the evening, than elsewhere. Still the dancing in
Elvas and Badajoz were near neighbors to each other. But a change had
come over Mrs. Shortridge, and now she made no protest, and saw little
impropriety in displays which she had denounced a few days ago.
Fashion is the religion of half the world; the mode makes the morals,
and what it sanctions cannot be wrong. The commissary, not so easy a
convert, sneeringly remarked that the exhibition was very suitable to
ballet dancers and such folk, plainly classing most of his guests in
that category; while Lady Mabel, with bare-faced hypocrisy, glided
about among her foreign friends, lamenting that her English clumsiness
cut her off from taking her part in a diversion, and in the displays
of grace and feeling, which, she said, with double meaning, were
unbecoming any but women of the Latin races.

The night was hot, and dancing made it hotter. So Mrs. Shortridge
called upon Lady Mabel to fill up the interval of rest, and gratify
the expectations of their friends with some of her choicest songs.

But yesterday so large an audience would have abashed her; now she
scarcely saw the throng around her in her eagerness to gain her end by
prolonging the amusements of the night. She sent L'Isle for her
guitar, made him turn over her music, never releasing him for a
moment, while she sung no Italian, French or English songs, but some
of those native and cherished requidillas, the airs and words of which
find here so ready an access t