beating, rolling, pounding in mortars, frying, freezing; for there was
to be ice-cream to-night of domestic manufacture;--and in the midst
of all these labors, Mrs. Sprowle and Miss Matilda were moving about,
directing and helping as they best might, all day long. When the evening
came, it might be feared they would not be in just the state of mind and
body to entertain company.

--One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a
billionaire.--"Antoine, I am going to have twenty people to dine
to-day." "Biens, Madame." Not a word or thought more about it, but get
home in season to dress, and come down to your own table, one of
your own guests.--"Giuseppe, we are to have a party a week from
to-night,--five hundred invitations--there is the list." The day comes.
"Madam, do you remember you have your party tonight?" "Why, so I have!
Everything right? supper and all?" "All as it should be, Madam."

"Send up Victorine." "Victorine, full toilet for this evening,--pink,
diamonds, and emeralds. Coiffeur at seven. Allez."--Billionism, or
even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with health and clear
conscience and youth and good looks,--but most blessed is this, that
it takes off all the mean cares which give people the three wrinkles
between the eyebrows, and leaves them free to have a good time and make
others have a good time, all the way along from the charity that tips
up unexpected loads of wood before widows' houses, and leaves foundling
turkeys upon poor men's door-steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at
the sight of anonymous fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a
perfect banquet in such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's
nature flowers out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant
atmosphere.

--A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind
of solemnity, so to speak. It involves so much labor and anxiety,--its
spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of
every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter to break in the
raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,--there
is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary
operations,--so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line
which divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local
universe,--that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests'
company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly ex