iquary.) "She
made a great ado about a dress that contained this letter. I have no
doubt it will tell a tale." Mr. Snivel draws from his breast-pocket the
letter found concealed in the old dress, and passes it to Madame
Montford, who receives it with a nervous hand. Her eyes become fixed
upon it, she glances over its defaced page with an air of bewilderment,
her face crimsons, then suddenly pales, her lips quiver--her every nerve
seems unbending to the shock. "Heavens! has it come to this?" she
mutters, confusedly. Her strength fails her; the familiar letter falls
from her fingers.--For a few moments she seems struggling to suppress
her emotions, but her reeling brain yields, her features become like
marble, she shrieks and swoons ere Mr. Snivel has time to clasp her in
his arms.

CHAPTER XX.

LADY SWIGGS ENCOUNTERS DIFFICULTIES ON HER ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK.

A pleasant passage of sixty hours, a good shaking up at the hands of
that old tyrant, sea-sickness, and Lady Swiggs finds the steamer on
which she took passage gliding majestically up New York Bay. There she
sits, in all her dignity, an embodiment of our decayed chivalry, a fair
representative of our first families. She has taken up her position on
the upper deck, in front of the wheel house. As one after another the
objects of beauty that make grand the environs of that noble Bay, open
to her astonished eyes, she contrasts them favorably or unfavorably with
some familiar object in Charleston harbor. There is indeed a similarity
in the conformation. And though ours, she says, may not be so extensive,
nor so grand in its outlines, nor so calm and soft in its perspective,
there is a more aristocratic air about it. Smaller bodies are always
more select and respectable. The captain, to whom she has put an hundred
and one questions which he answers in monosyllables, is not, she thinks,
so much of a gentleman as he might have been had he been educated in
Charleston. He makes no distinction in favor of people of rank.

Lady Swiggs wears that same faded silk dress; her black crape bonnet,
with two saucy red artificial flowers tucked in at the side, sits so
jauntily; that dash of brown hair is smoothed so exactly over her
yellow, shrivelled forehead; her lower jaw oscillates with increased
motion; and her sharp, gray eyes, as before, peer anxiously through her
great-eyed spectacles. And, generous reader, that you may not mistake
her, she has brought her inseparabl