erfume, dew and dream," he was saying, "is
what makes this the Lalla Rookh's land it is!" He smiled at himself and
confessed that Carrollton Gardens always went to his head. "Anna, did
you ever hear your mother sing--

"'There's a bower of roses--'?"

She lighted up to say yes, but the light was all he needed to be lured
on through a whole stanza, and a tender sight--Ocean silvering to
brown-haired Cynthia--were the two, as he so innocently strove to
recreate out of his own lost youth, for her and his nephew, this
atmosphere of poetry.

"'To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song!'"

he suavely ended--"I used to make Hilary sing that for me when he was a
boy."

"Doesn't he sing it yet?" asked Mrs. Callender.

"My God, madame, since I found him addicted to comic songs I've never
asked him!"

Kincaid led the laugh and the talk became lively. Anna was merrily
accused by Miranda (Mrs. Callender) of sharing the General's abhorrence
of facetious song. First she pleaded guilty and then reversed her plea
with an absurd tangle of laughing provisos delightful even to herself.
At the same time the General withdrew from his nephew all imputation of
a frivolous mind, though the nephew avowed himself nonsensical from
birth and destined to die so. It was a merry moment, so merry that
Kincaid's bare mention of Mandeville as Mandy made even the General
smile and every one else laugh. The Creole, to whom any mention of
himself, (whether it called for gratitude or for pistols and coffee,)
was always welcome, laughed longest. If he was Mandy, he hurried to
rejoin, the absent Constance "muz be Candy--ha, ha, ha!" And when Anna
said Miranda should always thenceforth be Randy, and Mrs. Callender said
Anna ought to be Andy, and the very General was seduced into suggesting
that then Hilary would be Handy, and when every one read in every one's
eye, the old man's included, that Brodnax would naturally be Brandy, the
Creole bent and wept with mirth, counting all that fine wit exclusively
his.

"But, no!" he suddenly said, "Hilary he would be Dandy, bic-ause he's
call' the ladies' man!"

"No, sir!" cried the General. "Hil--" He turned upon his nephew, but
finding him engaged with Anna, faced round to his chum: "For Heaven's
sake, Greenleaf, does he allow--?"

"He can't help it now," laughed his friend, "he's tagged it on himself
by one of his songs."

"Oh, by Jove, Hilary, it serves you right for singing them!"

Hilary laug