ere that the very highest society asserts
its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest _ton_,
you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country
village. As nuns drop their birth-names and become Sister Margaret and
Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop their personal distinctions
and become brothers and sisters of conversational charity. Nor are
fashionable people without their heroism. I believe there are men that
have shown as much self-devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to
the supper-table as ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized
his name. There are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing
can hold back from their errands of mercy. They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distil their soft words upon him like dew upon the green
herb. They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary apparition saddens
the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-room. I have known one
of these angels ask, _of her own accord_, that a desolate middle-aged
man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be presented to her by the
hostess. He wore no shirt-collar,--he had on black gloves,--and was
flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief! Match me this, ye proud
children of poverty, who boast of your paltry sacrifices for each other!
Virtue in humble life! What is that to the glorious self-renunciation
of a martyr in pearls and diamonds? As I saw this noble woman bending
gracefully before the social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty
heaving under the foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed
them,--I should have wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears,
except as a private demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of
self-consciousness and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
our fellow-citizens. It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always been
what might be called in general terms a gentleman. But what if at some
future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on whom that
lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be bestowed? This may
happen,--how soon the future only knows. Think of this miserable man
of coming political possibilities,--an unpresen