eligion, nor judgment,
nor anything but poverty and absolute impotence, will put a period to
the wild pursuit of pleasure that a fashionable season begins. Ill for
the next generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth!
Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of
their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyees, they do not
put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West
Indian toper dashes his insipid brandy with cayenne!"

Doubtless on such phenomena of the Season as these the ashes with
which the priest sprinkles the heads of the penitents while he murmurs
_Memento, homo, quod pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris_, falls like
the Vesuvian dust upon Pompeiian revels, and they are buried beyond
sight and hearing, for a time at least. But we all know that ashes
are a fertilizer, and by and by there blossoms above the ruins a later
season which is to the earlier one what the spirit is to the body.
Everywhere outdoors, then, it is spring: the damp and windy weather
has blown away, the sky is as blue as the violets and hyacinths
starting untended in the sod that the soft showers have clad in a
vivid verdure, and sunbeams are pouring over dome and obelisk and
pillared lines of marble till they shine with dazzling lustre through
the light screens of greenery. Then come the "kettle-drums," with
sunset looking in for company; then the receptions are held in rooms
full of sunshine, with open windows letting in the outside fragrance
and bird-song and glimpses of charming landscape, or they are turned
into fetes-champetres in the surrounding gardens; then come the
riding-parties to the Falls, where last night's sylph may be to-day's
Amazon in the midst of exceedingly grand scenery. Then, too, is the
time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep
and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of
the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek,
a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink
azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the
darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark
your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the
Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their
gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred
torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and ve