Such was one among many--I select it as the shortest--announcements of this cheap Elysium; and now, two words about Mrs. D. herself. She was a poor, thin, shrivelled-up little woman, with a rugged, broken-up face, whose profile looked like a jagged saw. Next to elegance of manner, her passion was personal appearance,--by which she meant the adventitious aid of false hair, rouge, and cosmetics; and these she employed with such ever-varying ingenuity that her complexion changed daily from classic pallor to Spanish richness, while the angle of incidence of her eyebrows took in everything, from forty-five degrees to the horizontal. Her style was "sylph," and so she was gauzy and floating in all her drapery. A black veil to the back of her head, a filmy, gossamer kind of scarf across her shoulders, assisted this deception, and when she crossed the room, gave her the air of a clothes'-line in a high wind. Black mittens, over fingers glowing in all the splendor of imitation rings, and a locket, about the size of a cheese-plate, containing the hair--some said the scalp--of the late T. J., completed a costume which Mrs. D. herself believed Parisian, but to which no revolution, democratic or social, could reduce a Frenchwoman. She borrowed her language as well as her costume from the "Grande Nation," and with this comfortable reflection, that she was not likely to be asked to restore the loan. Her French was about as incongruous as her dress; but Quebec, fortunately, was not Paris, and she drove her coach-and-six through "Adelow," with a hardihood that outstripped, if it did not defy, criticism. By the military and naval people she was deemed the best "fun" going; her pretension, her affectation, her shrewdness, and her simplicity, her religious homage to fashion, her unmerciful tyranny towards what she thought vulgarity, made her the subject of many a joke and much amusement. The other classes, the more regular _habitués_ of the "house," thought she was a princess in disguise; they revered her opinions as oracles, and only wondered how the court-end could spare one so evidently formed to be the glass of fashion. If I have been too prolix in my sketch, kind reader, attribute it to the true cause,--my anxiety to serve those who are good enough to place themselves under my guidance. Mrs. D. still lives; the establishment still survives; at five o'clock each day--ay, this very day, I have no doubt--her table is crowded by "the rank and fashion" of the Quebec world; and the chances are, if you yourself, worthy reader, should visit that city, that you may be glad to give your blank days to the fare of Madam Davis.