For some time, little Mrs. Coverdale was sufficiently amused by observing the appearance, manners, and customs of the various notabilities, as they were pointed out to her by no less a personage than her hostess, who, attracted by the simple beauty of her new acquaintance, and the evident pleasure and interest she took in all that was going on around her, actually devoted to her ten minutes of the valuable time in which, on such occasions, a clever mistress of the house is expected, and actually contrives, to say and do something civil to an hundred and fifty human beings, all prepared to magnify any accidental neglect into an intended slight, and to resent it accordingly. But, ere ten minutes had well elapsed, an illustrious stranger arrived, who was so intensely foreign that he could not be prevailed upon to speak or understand any language of which the deepest philologists present were able to make head or tail, and who, in his consequent bewilderment, had seated himself on the music-stool, with his back towards the key-board of the pianoforte--thereby establishing a complete blockade of that harmonious and indispensable instrument, which no representations in French, German, or Italian, could induce him to relinquish: so a breathless female aide-de-camp, in flaxen ringlets and white muslin, hurried up to report this frightful dilemma to the commandress-in-chief, who, with the greatest presence of mind, dispatched her to summon Count Cacklewitz, the young Hungarian patriot, who, it was generally believed, could speak everything, even his own language, and then hastened in person to raise the siege of the piano-forte. Alice, thus deserted, fell into the hands of a tall, gaunt, blue woman, rejoicing in a red nose and a long fluent tongue, who began to talk high art to her, and confused her about transcendentalism and Carlyle,--_the_ Oxford Graduate (viz., Turner’s single and singular disciple, wonderful Mr. Buskin), and pre-Raphaelism,--the meaning of Tennyson, when he condescends to be obscure (for he _can_ write real poetry, which “he who runs may read” and feel),--and of the dark Brownings, and Macaulay and the romance of history, and many other hackneyed pseudo-literary topics of the day, until our unlucky little heroine lapsed into that state of mental incapacity usually described as not knowing whether one is standing on one’s head or one’s heels. Then began vocal music, which mercifully silenced Alice’s strong-minded persecutor; and a rather raffish baritone gentleman, who wanted shearing dreadfully, and was all voice, eyes, and feathers, like a lean bird, accosted a singularly hard-featured, middle-aged German lady, as “Oh! thou beloved one!” to which she made an appropriately tender _soprano_ reply; and the company listened with much forbearance, for quite ten minutes, to the united affections of this interesting couple, detailed to an accompaniment now rapturous, now pathetic, at the end of which