--One would like to give a party now and then, if one could be a billionaire.--“Antoine, I am going to have twenty people to dine to-day.” “Biens, Madame.” Not a word or thought more about it, but get home in season to dress, and come down to your own table, one of your own guests.--“Giuseppe, we are to have a party a week from to-night,--five hundred invitations--there is the list.” The day comes. “Madam, do you remember you have your party tonight?” “Why, so I have! Everything right? supper and all?” “All as it should be, Madam.” “Send up Victorine.” “Victorine, full toilet for this evening,--pink, diamonds, and emeralds. Coiffeur at seven. Allez.”--Billionism, or even millionism, must be a blessed kind of state, with health and clear conscience and youth and good looks,--but most blessed is this, that it takes off all the mean cares which give people the three wrinkles between the eyebrows, and leaves them free to have a good time and make others have a good time, all the way along from the charity that tips up unexpected loads of wood before widows' houses, and leaves foundling turkeys upon poor men's door-steps, and sets lean clergymen crying at the sight of anonymous fifty-dollar bills, to the taste which orders a perfect banquet in such sweet accord with every sense that everybody's nature flowers out full--blown in its golden--glowing, fragrant atmosphere. --A great party given by the smaller gentry of the interior is a kind of solemnity, so to speak. It involves so much labor and anxiety,--its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of every-day family-life,--it is such a formidable matter to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table,--there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary operations,--so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local universe,--that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests' company on “this solemn occasion,” they would pretty nearly express the true state of things. The Colonel himself had been pressed into the service. He had pounded something in the great mortar. He had agitated a quantity of sweetened and thickened milk in what was called a cream-freezer. At eleven o'clock, A. M., he retired for a space. On returning, his color was noted to be somewhat heightened, and he showed a disposition to be jocular with the female help,--which tendency, displaying itself in livelier demonstrations than were approved at head-quarters, led to his being detailed to out-of-door duties, such as raking gravel, arranging places for horses to be hitched to, and assisting in the construction of an arch of wintergreen at the porch of the mansion.