The house at Neville Court is superb, and as I wandered from room to room with the amiable Frasers and my own Charlotte, I felt the luxury of kindred sentiment in a _new world_, and gave free course to thoughts that were little in unison with the passing scene. I fancied this magnificent ball-room, with its chandeliers, its lustres, and chalked floor, two short months ago, _perhaps_, the theatre of _another_ sort of assembly. I marked the spot where, in imagination, I could descry the lonely tressels supporting their sad and youthful burthen----that opening flower untimely torn from its stalk, and snatched from the warm hopes of unfolding spring. I beheld the mutes, and saw the tables spread with funeral fare; the “cold baked meats” of death; the sable hangings; the hirelings of office, marshalling their dismal train, at least with _features screwed_ to the occasion, and _voices_ subdued to whisper. With the most painful feelings I asked within myself, “must we fly from the fondest ties of nature, to seek for sorrow in ‘those chambers of imagery supplied from the undertaker’s mercenary taste;’ and fail to find it enshrined within the breast of a mother or a sister?” My cheek _curdled_, and my breathing became oppressed, while these melancholy phantoms glided past my mental vision, and like spectres mingled in the dance. The brilliant ball-room seemed to me no other than Holbein’s “dance of Death;” and when I was roused from my reverie by, “Miss Douglas, will you _daunce_?” let slip, as if from the mouth of one just dropping asleep, whose muscles had become too flaccid to retain the words within its lips any longer, I started as if I had been shot by one of Lady Campion’s arrows, and turned round upon--Mr. Johnson. Though I delight in dancing, there was too much lead at my heart to allow of merriment in my feet at this moment; and I therefore instinctively declined, and for a time got rid of the consummate puppyism of this disagreeable young man.