Scores of couples, of both sexes, were whirling frantically in the Old-World Teutonic waltz, and in the flushed faces and excited gestures of the gyrating dancers I could notice a total forgetfulness of modesty and decorum. From the alcoves came the sounds of the clinking of wine-glasses, the rattle of Moselle bottles, the pop, pop, of champagne corks, and songs, choruses, and loud shouts of laughter, together with a Babel-jabber of many confused tongues. My attention was attracted while listening to the music from the fine band, to a group that occupied a position which partially screened them from the glances of the larger portion of the audience and dancers, sitting and standing back as they did in an alcove. [Illustration: PRINCE OF WALES.] There were a dozen persons, perhaps, in the party, of both sexes, five or six men fashionably attired, and as many women, in all the grandeur and magnificence of harlotry--open and defiant--but well-bred harlotry. There were two central figures conversing in this group, and I could see that they were listened to with attention while speaking, one of them, particularly, a slightly bald-headed man, having secured the ears of his audience. The other central figure was a woman, beautiful, but of that beauty which is leprous to the sight, and fatal to those who encounter it as the shade of the Upas Tree. "Who is that man?" said I to an usher, nodding in the direction of the bald-headed person. [Sidenote: THE PRINCE AND HIS FRIENDS.] "That _man_" said the flunkey, "why, that's not a _man_, that's His Royal 'Ighness the Prince of Wales,--and long may he reign over us." And this worn, blase, sottish and almost brutally stupid-looking person in the Scotch tweed suit, with drooping eye-lids and sore eyes,--as if he seldom went to bed, and then did not stay long in it, looking to be forty-five years of age; prematurely bald, and without a particle of that apparent divinity which, it is said, doth hedge a monarch, was the self-same young lad of twenty, whom I had seen environed by bayonets in Broadway, ten years before. But how changed he was! Long nights of dissipation and debauchery had seamed the once youthful and unwrinkled features, and the under part of the face hung in heavy, adipose folds, like the dewlaps of a bullock. His figure was stout and without grace, and to me he seemed like a beer-drinking bagman or commercial peddler, half John Bull, half Hanoverian. The tweed suit, a material which he affects very much, was not at all calculated to set off or adorn his figure, and the great grandson of George III looked very undignified indeed as he leaned over the painted harlot resplendent in silks, and glistening with jewels, who is known to all wild London scapegraces, and young men about town, by the name of Mabel Gray, a name assumed for a purpose--to hide her identity with the gutters from which she has sprung.