p, at Tuticorin
or in the Persian Gulf; rubies and sapphires mined in Burmese Ava, and
diamonds from Borneo and Brazil. Is he choosing a bridal present? It
looks so; but no, he selects a splendid, brilliant solitaire, for which
he pays eight hundred dollars out of a plethoric purse, and also a
finger-ring, diamond too, for two hundred and fifty dollars. The
jewelers are polite, as the bankers were. He must be a large
cotton-planter, one of a class with whom a fondness for jewels serves as
a means of dozing away life in a kind of crystallization. He otherwise
adorns his stately person, till he has a Sublime Porte indeed, the very
vizier of a fairy tale glittering in barbaric gems and gold. His taste,
to speak it mildly, is expressed rather than subdued--not to be compared
with the quiet elegance of your husband or lover, madam or miss, but not
unsuited to his showy style, for all that. As the crimson-purple,
plume-like prince's feather has its own royal charm in Southern gardens
beside the pale and placidlily, so these luxuriant adornments, do not
misbecome his full and not too fleshy person. There is a certain harmony
in the Oriental sumptuousness of his attire, like radiant sunsets,
appropriate to certain styles of man and woman. Let us humble creatures
be content to have our portraits done in crayon, but the colonel calls
for the color-box.

So adorned and radiant, this variety of the American aloe floats into
the charmed circle of New Orleans society--that lively, sparkling
epitome and relic of the old regime. He has good letters and a fair
name, and mingles in the Mystick Krewe, that curious club, possible
nowhere else, that has raised mummery into the sphere of aesthetics.
Perhaps he has worn the gray, perhaps the blue. It is only in the very
arcana of exclusive passion it makes much difference. But gray or blue,
or North or South in birth, he is in every essential a Southerner, as
many, like S.S. Prentiss, curiously independent of nativity, are. He is
well received and courteously entreated. He has his little suppers at
Moreau's, and knows the ways of the place and names of the waiters. He
has his promenades, his drives, his club visits, is seen everywhere--a
brilliant convolvulus now, twining the espaliers of that Saracenic
fabric of society; to speak architecturally, its very summer-house. He
visits the opera and gives it his frank approval, but confesses a
preference for the old plantation-melodies. He crushes