There is over all those stale meat pies, ycleped large cities, a self-styled upper crust that rises in puffs above the solids. It rejects every thing that is not as light and as trifling as itself, and to say the least of it, has but little virtue or consistency. It covers the virtues and the vices of the social compact, and smothers in _flour_ and _paste_ the unhappy genius who endeavors to penetrate it. As nothing was made in vain, perhaps this self-important crust, like the web of the spider, was designed to catch the painted and gilded drones, whose presence and senseless buzzing might otherwise have disturbed the working party of mankind at their labors, and have caused them to leave the world to starve. To this upper stratum of society in New York, Mrs. Wilson was introduced by her new made friends, and she continued in the ascendent for three months, but unfortunately for human greatness, one evening at a large and fashionable rout, a noble marquis was announced, who to the astonishment of every person present exclaimed, as he was presented to Mrs. Wilson, “Poll Johnson are you here, when did you leave the millinary line?” This was sufficient—the party broke up in confusion, as though a case of plague had occurred in the _circle_. Mrs. Wilson fainted, and was sent home in a hack as a bundle of soiled linen is sent to the washerwomen, duly marked and numbered upon the outside; and the aristocratic family who had been imposed upon by her, went through with a three weeks’ purification at Saratoga Springs, whence they returned with a sin offering, in the shape of a real nobleman—a perfect simpleton of a count—whose soul lay in whiskers, and whose heart was in bottle green. Mrs. Wilson, like the jack daw, stripped of borrowed plumes, left New York in great haste, and settled upon a country farm near Belleview, where at the opening of my sketch she reigned mistress of the ton. As Mary Howard and Fitzgerald entered the saloon, a number of light footed creatures preceded by the super-human Mrs. W. came sailing across the room to meet them. The ball had commenced, and numbers were dancing to a tune which was then in vogue, and which had been made for these words— “Come list to me a minute, A song I’m going to begin it, There’s something serious in it, ’Tis all about the Law, L!——A!——W!——law! Has got a deuce of a claw.” Here the ladies all curtesied to the gentlemen, and the gentlemen all bowed to the ladies, and all continued for five seconds looking in their partners faces with pendent arms, straight under-pinnings, body and breast bent into a half circle, and head erect— Like some brass God of Heathen make In shape unheard of——; but as soon as the note expressive of the word _claw_ was ended, which in the language of Milton, was like “Linked sweetness long drawn out;”