Aunt Fanny proposed to marry her nephew, Lind Mason--or Lindley Brown Mason, for the remotest relation took a color from the parent stock--to little Sue Brown, daughter of her nephew, Walter Brown, Esq., pork merchant. That was her object in the intriguing that led to the duel. Captain Mason was a man-about-town, with no wish to marry any one in particular, but anxious to raise the wind, to clear off his play debts and attend the match race between Kentucky and Asteroid, then much talked of in racing circles. His object, to use his own picturesque language, was "to put the saddle on the right horse." Bob Nettles, the other party to the duel, was a sort of general clerk or factotum to Walter Brown. He was _épris_ of little Sudie Brown, his employer's daughter, one of those merry little romps no one thinks of as a grown woman until she surprises society by marrying. Bob was a shy, modest little fellow, with scrubby poll, pug nose, stubby palms, like leather, from base ball, and with a habit of laughing in the nose, called sniggering. He had merry gray eyes and hair of a pure tow color, which I take to be the true plebeian tint, without a sanguine shade in it--just the last man you would think of as engaging in a duel. To tell how these various shades were woven into the carmine flower is the purpose of this sketch. Bob would probably never have looked so high but for the bookkeeper at Brown, Ochre & Co.'s pork-house, Major Johnstone--nicknamed Toady Johnstone, because he could not help reflecting the air, tone, gestures and opinions of those he conversed with. But the major was of tried courage, and had a pistol wound from a duel in the thigh; and no one ever heard an ungentlemanly word from his lips. He had a store of singularly inept recollections in respect to such marriages, which had generally, turned out badly; but that was nothing. The major, like a novelist, believed he had done his whole duty in marrying a couple, and the deuce might take them after that. Sue had not, at this time, shown any marked preference, though she liked Bob as a playmate, and had a sort of awe of her cousin Lind and his marvellous stories of adventures in the Lost Cause. It was her mother, who by no means approved of a match with the little plebeian, that first gave her daughter a hint of such pretensions.