tion, it will be understood that both parties to the compact
were carrying out their agreement with praiseworthy faithfulness.

But even without the duties devolved upon him by love or newspapers, Tom
Leslie, a trained observer of society around him, would have found
plenty of occupation on the favorite promenades and in the parlors and
halls of the International and Cataract. Such a complete and total
revolution in society was beginning to show itself, in the gradual
dropping away of the old "good families" who years before had made
Niagara, Saratoga and Newport their Meccas at midsummer; such bloated
pretenders, with unlicked cubs of families, the "shoddy aristocracy" who
had first aided to make the war, and then make dishonest fortunes from
it, had come up to take their places, with everything about them, sire
and son, mother and daughter, new, arrogant and unpleasant; and there
was such a marked absence of that Southern element which in other days
had supplied money to obsequious waiters and green girls to needy
fortune-hunters,--that there seemed to have been a complete turn of the
kaleidoscope, and it almost puzzled an old habitue to know whether he
had not exchanged lands as well as years.

And something else, of no secondary importance, presented its claims to
notice. This was the "blue and buttons"--the "absenteeism" to which
notice has been before so often called during the progress of this
narration. The result of the Seven Days' Battles was just coming to the
sojourners at Niagara, through the Buffalo and New York papers; and
while the Fourth of July address of McClellan to his soldiers, which
came among the other items of news from the army, and which was then and
there being read and commented upon, showed that the last chance of
victory was not yet lost, it showed at the same time how fearfully the
ranks of our armies had been thinned and what a necessity there was
that every man who had pretended to be a soldier, and who had from any
cause been so far absent from the field, should return at once and aid
to sustain the perilled cause. And yet through every corridor of the
leading houses at Niagara, in every parlor, on every walk and on every
piazza, sat, stood, walked, read, smoked or flirted, the blue-clothed,
buttoned, shoulder-strapped, jaunty-capped, natty-whiskered and
killingly-moustached officers of the Union army, who had sworn to serve
the country and aid to defend the republic,--but who paid no