''Yes,' I thought, 'there might be.' ''Just as I, bewildered by Miss Henrietta's keen shafts and graceful manoeuvres, yield that a woman is, once in a century, gifted with a man's depth of thought and her sex's loveliness.' The comparison was odious. What did I do? Oh, I (the swarthy Ethiop) only rose from my faded arm chair, saluted Mr. Channing (the lordly European) as if I were his partner in a quadrille, and brought out my cameos and mosaics to show him. In about half an hour the beauty of his reasoning and comparison reached his brain, but mine was impenetrable to his most honeyed apologies; as I very sweetly assured him, 'I couldn't understand, didn't see the drift, couldn't connect the links.' Leon says ancient history is a fable, and Herodotus a myth, and all because a _woman_ sat upon the tripod at Delphi, and because a _woman_ wore the helmet and carried the shield of wisdom.' 'What's the matter, Harry?' asked Fanny, compassionately, as her small fingers were stretched like infant grid-irons before her eyes, and a silence ensued. 'My new bonnet, Fanny dear, I am wondering what it shall be; we must go down this very morning and decide.' Did you ever think, Narcissus, and you, Gustav, and all of you boys, when you are engaged in your small diplomacies and _coups de main_, and feeling like giants in intellect beside the dear little girls who play polkas for you of evenings and sing sweet ballads, that _pour bien juger les grands, il faut les approcher_? I thought so that morning, as I heard the animated discussion that succeeded Henrietta's monologue; a discussion into which all sorts of delicate conceits of lace and flowers entered largely, and which savored about as much of the preceding elements as last night's Charlotte Russe of this morning's coffee. Since Henrietta's oration, I am more than ever afraid of a Vulcan. It is very plain that our most fashionably cut suits and most delicately perfumed billets are not all powerful,--that the dear creatures are either waking or we have been asleep. _Reveillons!_ '_Aux armes, citoyens!_' Now, while I was writing that last word, a heavy hand was laid on my shoulder, and looking up, I saw--Nap. I love Nap. I have a girlish weakness (let some lady arraign me for this hereafter) for him; so I shouted out and grasped his hands. 'How are the boys?' 'Flourishing. Come to stay? 'Yes, old fellow.' 'Stocks up?' 'To the sky.' 'The governor?' 'All right.' _I_ haven't any governor. Nap has; and one that saw fit to persecute him from twenty to thirty, because he declined to take 'orders.' _Per Bacco!_ Never mind, a fit of paralysis has shaken the opposition out of the old gentleman at last, and Nap is in sunshine in consequence, and rushes around Wall street like a veteran. But I didn't promise to tell you about Nap, or the girls either; it was only a few rays of light I had to dash over 'our beaux;' so where is your mother, belle Beatrice? I must make my adieux.