The drawing-room in which the so highly honored family were assembled in eager expectation, was a large oblong square, papered with purple and gold-spotted paper, and full of gaudy furniture. There were two chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, all gilt and glitter; gilt sconces, with cut glass globes, on the walls; a profusion of gold-framed pictures and engravings; large mirrors over the mantels and between the windows; red velvet, and blue velvet, and green velvet arm-chairs and sofas, all around; a huge piano; vases; ormolu tables; tables of sienna marble; statuettes on brackets; a bust of Mr. Webster on a pedestal; divers ornaments in all directions; a vivid, huge-figured Brussels carpet on the floor; and yellow and purple curtains to the windows. Taste, not in its dying agonies, but murdered outright and horribly stone dead, was the prevailing sentiment of the entire apartment. Judged by a rigorous artistic eye, the same estheticide was chargeable upon the drawing-room’s occupants. They were all excessively _à-la-mode_ in their general appearance, and evidently of the highest respectability. Mrs. Atkins, the mother—who sat languidly leaning in the corner of a velvet sofa, with her cheek resting on her fingers—was a fair-haired, waxen-faced lady of middle age, with pallid-blue eyes, a snub nose, a rabbit mouth half open, and a receding chin. She was expensively arrayed in full dress of changeable silk, with many flounces; wore a lace cap, and had a general air of weak good-nature and dawdling insipidity, enervating to behold. Miss Atkins, the eldest daughter, who occupied the other end of the sofa, was a yellow-haired, waxen-faced young lady of at least twenty-five; the living suggestion of what her mother had been at her age; with a chin even more receding, a nose as snub, eyes as pallidly blue, the same drooping rabbit mouth, and the same air of mild vapidity and hopeless enervation. She was also expensively attired, in deep blue satin, cut low in the neck, and fitting closely to her full and shapely bosom. Julia, the younger daughter, was an ultra fashionable miss of sweet sixteen; with a bold, saucy face, smooth dark hair, a short, broad nose, hard, black eyes, a prude’s mouth, and a great length and breadth of flat circular jaw. The two young men, who were standing like highly respectable caryatides, at opposite corners of the mantel, were snobs of the purest water, both in dress and manner. They were got up in the English style; for, like some of the highly respectable Bostonians, they cherished a noble passion for that sort of Anglicism caricatured by Mr. Punch. Their black trowsers were of the tightest, on legs the slimmest; their black dress coats were close in the body, large in the sleeves, and small in the tail; their vests were very short, their collars high and stiff, and each wore the Joinville neck-tie, a horizontal bar of silk reaching from ear to ear, to the successful adjustment of which, as Punch