the forfeiture of my credit, and the risk of maintaining
it.

I would willingly recall some of the strange incidents of that great
occasion, but my mind can only dwell upon one, as, brush in hand,
I asked permission to remove some accidental dust,--a leave most
graciously accorded, and ascribed to my town-bred habits of attention.
At last--it was nigh midnight, and for above an hour the company had
received no accession to its ranks; quadrilles had succeeded quadrilles,
and the business of the scene went swimmingly on,--all the time-honored
events of similar assemblages happening with that rigid regularity
which, if evening-parties were managed by steam, and regulated by a
fly-wheel, could not proceed with more ordinary routine. "Heads of
houses" with bald scalps led out simpering young boarding-school misses,
and danced with a noble show of agility, to refute any latent suspicion
of coming age. There were the usual number of very old people, who vowed
the dancing was only a shuffling walk, not the merry movement they
had practised half a century ago; and there were lack-a-daisical young
gentlemen, with waistcoats variegated as a hearth-rug, and magnificent
breast-pins like miniature pokers, who lounged and lolled about,
as though youth were the most embarrassing and wearying infliction
mortality was heir to.

There were, besides, all the varieties of the class young lady, as seen
in every land where muslin is sold, and white shoes are manufactured.
There was the slight young lady, who floated about with her gauzy dress
daintily pinched in two; then there was the short and dumpling young
lady, who danced with a duck in her gait; and there were a large
proportion of the flouncing, flaunting kind, who took the figures of
the quadrille by storm, and went at the "right and left" as if they were
escaping from a fire; and there was Mrs. Davis herself, in a spangled
toque and red shoes, pottering about from place to place, with a
terrible eagerness to be agreeable and fashionable at the same time.

It was, I have said, nigh midnight as I stood at the half-open door,
watching the animated and amusing scene within, when Mrs. Davis,
catching sight of me, and doubtless for the purpose of displaying my
specious livery, ordered me to open a window, or close a shutter, or
something of like importance. I had scarcely performed the service, when
a kind of half titter through the room made me look round, and, to my
unspeakable horro