the spring of 1870, Aunt Mary
invited Mr. Hempstead to visit them at Chappaqua, as she felt under
some obligations to him for having given her his state-room, and
subsequently executed some little commissions for her, between New York
and Nassau. He came out here, and made a visit of a week. In July of
the same year. Aunt Mary and Ida went abroad, and from that time the
acquaintance dropped. That he admired Ida know, but how any one could
manufacture an engagement from such slight material, I cannot imagine.

One day last summer, during the excitement of the campaign, I had taken
up a rose-tinted society journal as a little respite from politics,
when my eyes fell upon a paragraph announcing Ida's engagement to Mr.
William Hempstead, Purser of the _Missouri_; and then I for the first
time learnt the officer's name. My astonishment can be imagined; and
to this day it remains an enigma who invented that little society item.
If a fertile-minded reporter had desired to head his column of
Engagements in High Life with Ida's name, and had announced that she
would shortly be led to the hymeneal altar (I believe that is the
correct phrase in newspaper parlance) by any one in our circle of
acquaintances with whom she was at all intimate, it would not have been
surprising; but why a person whom she had not seen or heard of for two
years should have been selected, is a mystery worthy of G. P. R. James.

But in writing about Mr. Hempstead, I have neglected his sister. Miss
Hempstead was a tall, fine-looking young girl, with, however, a
strikingly foreign appearance for an American _pur sang_. She was
born, she told me, in Belize, Central America, where her father was
United States Consul. A tropical sun had given her a complexion of
Spanish darkness, heightened by large black eyes and jet black
hair--the exact counterpart, Ida afterwards told me, of her brother,
who was often mistaken for a Cuban.

When the period of the consulate of Mr. Hempstead pere was over, he had
become so much attached to Belize, that he decided to make it his
future residence. His daughter said she could not imagine what he
found to like in the place, for between earthquakes and yellow fever,
one was in a continual state of terror; there was no society, the
population being almost entirely negro, and no schools; consequently
the children of the few white resident families were obliged to go to
England or to the United States to be educated.

M