newspaper, who consumed
a ruinous amount of sandwiches and bottled ale.

Before the honeymoon was over, the bride began to display some of the
less amiable features of her character. She sneered at the situation
and simplicity of the establishment, and protested she was
unaccustomed to that sort of style. She was perfectly sincere in this,
for the defunct ship chandler had lived in a basement and two attic
chambers.

By dint of repeated persecutions, she induced her husband to move into
a larger house; and finally, after the expiration of many years, we
find them established in the upper part of the city, in a splendid
mansion, looking out upon a fashionable square, with a little marble
boy in front sitting on a brick, and spouting a stream of Croton
through a clam shell.

One morning, Mr. Brandon came home about eleven o'clock. On entering
his front door, he beheld, lounging on a sofa, with the _Courrier des
Etats Unis_ in his hand, Claude, the handsome French page of Mrs. B.

"Where is Mrs. B.?" asked the elderly broker.

"Madame is in her boudoir," replied the page; "but," he added, seeing
his master move in that direction, "I do not know whether she is
visible."

"That I will ascertain myself, young gentleman," replied the broker,
with a slight shade of irony in his tone. "But tell me, is there any
one with her?"

"Only M. Auguste Charmant," said the page.

"That confounded Frenchman!" muttered the plebeian broker. "My Yankee
house is turned topsyturvy by these foreigners. There's a French cook,
and a French chambermaid, and the friend of the family is a Frenchman.
I don't know what I'm eating, and I hardly understand a word that's
said at my table. Sometimes, by way of change, they talk Italian
instead of French. One might as well associate with a stack of
monkeys. Out of the way, jackanapes."

"Monsieur," said the page, with true Gallic dignity, "I was about to
proceed to announce monsieur."

"Monsieur can announce himself," replied Brandon, with the grin of a
hyena; and proceeding up stairs, he entered the boudoir without
knocking.

Mrs. Brandon was lounging on a _fauteuil_, in an elegant morning
toilet--literally plunged and embowered in costly Brussels lace. Her
delicate, bejewelled fingers were playing with the petals of an
exquisite bouquet. Thanks to a good constitution, a life of ease, an
accomplished milliner and an incomparable dentist, the fair Maria,
though the mother of a marriageable g