ions of state.

The first call Laura received from the other extremity of the Washington
aristocracy followed close upon the heels of the one we have just been
describing. The callers this time were the Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins,
the Hon. Mrs. Patrique Oreille (pronounced O-relay,) Miss Bridget
(pronounced Breezhay) Oreille, Mrs. Peter Gashly, Miss Gashly, and Miss
Emmeline Gashly.

The three carriages arrived at the same moment from different directions.
They were new and wonderfully shiny, and the brasses on the harness were
highly polished and bore complicated monograms. There were showy coats
of arms, too, with Latin mottoes. The coachmen and footmen were clad in
bright new livery, of striking colors, and they had black rosettes with
shaving-brushes projecting above them, on the sides of their stove-pipe
hats.

When the visitors swept into the drawing-room they filled the place with
a suffocating sweetness procured at the perfumer's. Their costumes,
as to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were
rainbow-hued; they were hung with jewels--chiefly diamonds. It would
have been plain to any eye that it had cost something to upholster these
women.

The Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins was the wife of a delegate from a distant
territory--a gentleman who had kept the principal "saloon," and sold the
best whiskey in the principal village in his wilderness, and so, of
course, was recognized as the first man of his commonwealth and its
fittest representative.

He was a man of paramount influence at home, for he was public spirited,
he was chief of the fire department, he had an admirable command of
profane language, and had killed several "parties." His shirt fronts
were always immaculate; his boots daintily polished, and no man could
lift a foot and fire a dead shot at a stray speck of dirt on it with a
white handkerchief with a finer grace than he; his watch chain weighed a
pound; the gold in his finger ring was worth forty five dollars; he wore
a diamond cluster-pin and he parted his hair behind. He had always been,
regarded as the most elegant gentleman in his territory, and it was
conceded by all that no man thereabouts was anywhere near his equal in
the telling of an obscene story except the venerable white-haired
governor himself. The Hon. Higgins had not come to serve his country in
Washington for nothing. The appropriation which he had engineered
through Congress for the maintenance, of the I