boots
were brown with dust; the magenta ribbon round his neck had become a
moist rope; his hat had been thrown down and rumpled; a drop of oil
had made a spot upon his trousers; his whiskers were draggled and out
of order, and his mouth was full of dirt. I doubt if Mr Manfred Smith
will ever undertake to manage another bazaar.

The duchess I think was right in her endeavour to mitigate the riot
among Mrs Munro's nymphs. Indeed there was rioting among other nymphs
than hers, though her noise and their noise was the loudest; and it
was difficult to say how there should not be riot, seeing what was to
be the recognised manner of transacting business. At first there was
something of prettiness in the rioting. The girls, who went about
among the crowd, begging men to put their hands into lucky bags,
trading in rose-buds, and asking for half-crowns for cigar lighters,
were fresh in their muslins, pretty with their braided locks, and
perhaps not impudently over-pressing in their solicitations to male
strangers. While they were not as yet either aweary or habituated
to the necessity of importunity, they remembered their girlhood and
their ladyhood, their youth and their modesty, and still carried with
them something of the bashfulness of maidenhood; and the young men,
the wether lambs, were as yet flush with their half-crowns, and the
elder sheep had not quite dispensed the last of their sovereigns or
buttoned up their trousers pockets. But as the work went on, and the
dust arose, and the prettinesses were destroyed, and money became
scarce, and weariness was felt, and the heat showed itself, and the
muslins sank into limpness, and the ribbons lost their freshness,
and braids of hair grew rough and loose, and sidelocks displaced
themselves--as girls became used to soliciting and forgetful of their
usual reticences in their anxiety for money, the charm of the thing
went, and all was ugliness and rapacity. Young ladies no longer moved
about, doing works of charity; but harpies and unclean birds were
greedy in quest of their prey.

"Put a letter in my post-office," said one of Mrs Munro's bevy, who
officiated in a postal capacity behind a little square hole, to a
young man on whom she pounced out and had caught him and brought up,
almost with violence.

The young man tendered some scrap of paper and a sixpence.

"Only sixpence!" said the girl.

A cabman could not have made the complaint with a more finished
accent of rapaci