r the air of a clothes'-line in a high wind.

Black mittens, over fingers glowing in all the splendor of imitation
rings, and a locket, about the size of a cheese-plate, containing the
hair--some said the scalp--of the late T. J., completed a costume
which Mrs. D. herself believed Parisian, but to which no revolution,
democratic or social, could reduce a Frenchwoman.

She borrowed her language as well as her costume from the "Grande
Nation," and with this comfortable reflection, that she was not likely
to be asked to restore the loan. Her French was about as incongruous
as her dress; but Quebec, fortunately, was not Paris, and she drove her
coach-and-six through "Adelow," with a hardihood that outstripped, if it
did not defy, criticism.

By the military and naval people she was deemed the best "fun" going;
her pretension, her affectation, her shrewdness, and her simplicity,
her religious homage to fashion, her unmerciful tyranny towards what
she thought vulgarity, made her the subject of many a joke and much
amusement. The other classes, the more regular _habitues_ of the
"house," thought she was a princess in disguise; they revered her
opinions as oracles, and only wondered how the court-end could spare one
so evidently formed to be the glass of fashion.

If I have been too prolix in my sketch, kind reader, attribute it to
the true cause,--my anxiety to serve those who are good enough to place
themselves under my guidance. Mrs. D. still lives; the establishment
still survives; at five o'clock each day--ay, this very day, I have
no doubt--her table is crowded by "the rank and fashion" of the Quebec
world; and the chances are, if you yourself, worthy reader, should visit
that city, that you may be glad to give your blank days to the fare of
Madam Davis.

It was ten o'clock in the forenoon as I arrived at her door, and sent
in Captain Pike's letter, announcing my arrival. I found Mrs. D. in
what she called her own room,--a little den of about eleven feet square,
shelved all round, and showing an array of jars and preserve-pots
that was most imposing,--the offerings of skippers from the West India
Islands and Madeira, who paid a kind of black-mail in preserved ginger,
guavas, yams, pepper-pots, chili, and potted crabs that would have given
liver complaints to half the Province.

Mrs. D. was standing on a step-ladder, arranging her treasures by the
aid of a negro boy of about twelve years old, as I entered; and not
f