d feel an awful
responsibility in selecting a Countess. How do you do it?"

Lord Dunbeg nervously joined in the general laughter as Sybil
ejaculated:

"Oh, Victoria!" but Miss Dare continued without a smile or any elevation
of her monotonous voice:

"Now, Sybil, don't interrupt me, please. I am deeply interested in Lord
Dunbeg's conversation. He understands that my interest is purely
scientific, but my happiness requires that I should know how Countesses
are selected. Lord Dunbeg, how would you recommend a friend to choose a
Countess?"

Lord Dunbeg began to be amused by her impudence, and he even tried to
lay down for her satisfaction one or two rules for selecting Countesses,
but long before he had invented his first rule, Victoria had darted off
to a new subject.

"Which would you rather be, Lord Dunbeg? an Earl or George Washington?"

"George Washington, certainly," was the Earl's courteous though rather
bewildered reply.

"Really?" she asked with a languid affectation of surprise; "it is
awfully kind of you to say so, but of course you can't mean it.

"Indeed I do mean it."

"Is it possible? I never should have thought it."

"Why not, Miss Dare?"

"You have not the air of wishing to be George Washington."

"May I again ask, why not?"

"Certainly. Did you ever see George Washington?"

"Of course not. He died fifty years before I was born."

"I thought so. You see you don't know him. Now, will you give us an idea
of what you imagine General Washington to have looked like?"

Dunbeg gave accordingly a flattering description of General Washington,
compounded of Stuart's portrait and Greenough's statue of Olympian Jove
with Washington's features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened
with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then
she enlightened him as follows:

"All you have been saying is perfect stuff--excuse the vulgarity of the
expression. When I am a Countess I will correct my language. The
truth is that General Washington was a raw-boned country farmer, very
hard-featured, very awkward, very illiterate and very dull; very bad
tempered, very profane, and generally tipsy after dinner."

"You shock me, Miss Dare!" exclaimed Dunbeg.

"Oh! I know all about General Washington. My grandfather knew him
intimately, and often stayed at Mount Vernon for weeks together. You
must not believe what you read, and not a word of what Mr. Carrington
will say. He is a Virginian and w