m; and the
St. Cecilia I have just used up. I'm a team in my way, you see;--run all
these fashionable oppositions right into bankruptcy." Never were words
spoken with more truth. Want of patronage found all places of rational
amusement closed. Societies for intellectual improvement, one after
another, died of poverty. Fashionable lectures had attendance only when
fashionable lecturers came from the North; and the Northman was sure to
regard our taste through the standard of what he saw before him.

The house of the hostess triumphs, and is corpulent of wealth and
splendor. To-morrow she will feed with the rich crumbs that fall from
her table the starving poor. And although she holds poor virtue in utter
contempt, feeding the poor she regards a large score on the passport to
a better world. A great marble stairway winds its way upward at the
farther end of the hall, and near it are two small balconies, one on
each side, presenting barricades of millinery surmounted with the
picturesque faces of some two dozen denizens, who keep up an incessant
gabbling, interspersed here and there with jeers directed at Mr.
Soloman. "Who is he seeking to accommodate to-night?" they inquire,
laughing merrily.

The house is full, the hostess has not space for one friend more; she
commands the policemen to close doors. An Alderman is the only exception
to her _fiat_. "You see," she says, addressing herself to a courtly
individual who has just saluted her with urbane deportment, "I must
preserve the _otium cum dignitate_ of my (did I get it right?) standing
in society. I don't always get these Latin sayings right. Our
Congressmen don't. And, you see, like them, I ain't a Latin scholar, and
may be excused for any little slips. Politics and larnin' don't get
along well together. Speaking of politics, I confess I rather belong to
the Commander and Quabblebum school--I do!"

At this moment (a tuning of instruments is heard in the dancing-hall)
the tall figure of the accommodation man is seen, in company of the
venerable Judge, passing hurriedly into a room on the right of the
winding stairs before described. "Judge!" he exclaims, closing the door
quickly after him, "you will be discovered and exposed. I am not
surprised at your passion for her, nor the means by which you seek to
destroy the relations existing between her and George Mullholland. It is
an evidence of taste in you. But she is proud to a fault, and, this I
say in friendship, you