servants--in
addition to the female who came to the house to receive the weekly
wash--performed their daily task intelligently and harmoniously.

A bath of atar of roses next received the master of the House of
Pont-Noir. This was renewed every hour of the day; for Roseton's fancy
indulged the frequent and the casual lavation, and his exacting taste
demanded the strictest purity. A careless servant once ventured to leave
the bath filled without a change of the fluid, after it had been
occupied; but the negligence was at once detected by the master of
Pont-Noir, and his weekly allowance of cologne-water was summarily
reduced. Upon the ceiling, over the bath, were frescoed, in Titianelli's
richest style, the most graceful legends of mythology. Here Theseus
toyed with Ariadne; here the infant Mercury furtively enticed the
Grecian Short-horns; here Triton blew his seaweed-tangled horn, and
troops of ocean-nymphs threw the surface of the deep into 'sparkling
commotions of splendor;' here Venus allured Anchises, by sweetly calling
him to the leafy tops of Ida; here Deucalion surmounted the miraculous
floods; and here Pyrrha first instructed wondering men in the knowledge
of the existence, beauties and duties of the fairer part of creation.
Here, reclining in dreamful ease, and indulging in the perpetual warmth
by which the bath confessed the power of unseen caloric agency, Roseton
was wont ever to sport with delicious memories, now with rapturous
hopes, and at times to compose those elegant sonnets for the New York
weekly newspapers, for each one of which a thousand dollars was joyfully
given by the delighted proprietors to the poor of the city.

Carefully wiped, and clothed in a morning robe by twelve gentlemanly
attendants, each one a scion of the first families of the metropolis,
Roseton was borne to the breakfasting apartment. Here, indeed, a scene
presented itself, among whose splendors imagination only could safely
dwell, and before which the practical and the prosaic mind might well
grow comatose or skeptical. Malachite tables of every conceivable shape
from the Ural; carpets to whose texture the shawls of Cashmere had
become tributary; paintings by all the known, and many of the unknown,
old masters; these were only rivaled by chairs of the most undeniable
and gorgeous curled maple; and a beaufet of true cherry acknowledged, in
common with a Jerome horologe, a Connecticut origin. These incredible
adjuncts to luxury