"I have observed," said an elderly gentleman, as he watched from the window of his club the pretty procession of new clothes winding churchward on Easter morning, "that some ladies of high fashion dress more and more elaborately as they advance in years, and as the sweet light of youth fades from their eyes it is replaced by a greater blaze of diamonds upon their persons." It was the venerable Ambassador from Sennaar who spoke, and who was smiling pleasantly upon the cheerful scene. "For myself," he continued, "I can recall nothing more enchanting in human form than the granddaughter of my old friend whom I went to see some years ago in Newport, and who bounded in at the open window from the garden on a perfect June morning--herself incarnate June--clad in a white muslin dress, her hair simply knotted behind, holding a rose in her hand, and with the loveliest rose in her cheeks. That young woman, a girl not yet twenty, now has girls of her own more than twenty. I wonder if she wears a very elaborate bonnet this Easter morning, and whether her dress is a mass of pleats and puffs and marvellous trimmings, which, when profusely extravagant upon the form of an elder woman, always remind me of signals of distress hung out upon a craft that is drifting far away from the enchanted isles of youth. Is it the instinctive effort to prolong the brilliancy of youth that induces the advancing woman to decorate herself so brightly? Is it the involuntary hope that she will really seem to be buoyant and gay of heart if only her dress be gay? As they go trooping by I mark that richly caparisoned dowager, and I recall the days when I was merely an attache of the embassy, and when in the modest parlor in Bond Street she sang: "'I wadna walk in silk attire, Nor siller hae to spare, Gin I must from my true love part, Nor think on Donald mair." The old gentleman from Sennaar is always permitted to have his own way, and he prattles on without interruption. If you don't care to listen, it is always easy to withdraw, and to look out at another window, and to make your own comments instead of heeding his. "But that was not exactly what I had in mind as I watched this pretty Easter procession," resumed the venerable Ambassador; "but the truth is that when I see a crowd of brightly dressed women, my mind scatters, as it were, and I am very apt not to hit my mark."