urday's drive to Coney Island, and
round by Fort Hamilton and the Narrows," muttered Jack, as the horses
toiled up a steep in Central Park; "this here is about as amusing as
riding in a black maria would be."

Ah, Jack! You are too young to comprehend the necessity that rests upon
us of swelling our dignity into some proportion to a growing stock
balance. It is irksome this living on stilts, but an unfortunate
inability to match our fortune by increasing our bulk leaves us no
alternative but to augment our belongings so as to preserve the fitness
of things at any cost. There is as yet no Society for the Emancipation
of Princes, and the Association for the Amelioration of the Condition of
the Children of the Rich has no place in the list of New York
philanthropies.

Mrs. Hilbrough prudently spent her first winter on Manhattan Island in
looking about her. She ventured a dinner company two or three times, but
went no further. She received calls from the wives of those who had, and
those who wished to have, business relations with her husband, and she
returned them, making such observations as she could on the domestic
economy, or rather the domestic extravagance, of those she visited. The
first result of this was that she changed her door-boy. The fine-looking
mulatto she had installed in imitation of some of her richer Brooklyn
acquaintances had to be discharged. The Anglomania of the early eighties
cruelly abolished the handsome darky hall-boy, that most artistic living
bronze, with all his suggestion of barbaric magnificence, and all his
Oriental obsequiousness. His one fault was that he was not English.
Fashion forbade the rich to avail themselves of one of the finest
products of the country. The lackey who took his place had the English
superciliousness, and marked the advance of American civilization by
adding a new discomfort and deformity to the life of people of fashion.

The minister of the church in which the Hilbroughs had taken pews sent
his wife to call on Mrs. Hilbrough, and two of the church officers,
knowing the value of such an acquisition to the church, showed their
Christian feeling in the same way. Many of her old Degraw street and
South Oxford street friends called at the new house, their affection
being quickened by a desire "to see what sort of style the Hilbroughs
are putting on now." Some of her Brooklyn calls she returned out of a
positive liking for good old friends, some because the callers w