Peg's dinner, as dinners go, was a creature of magnificence, with Peg, beautiful as a moss-rose, at the General's right, and Dolly Madison's own silver--massy, and, as the women said, “gorgeous,”--to glisten on the white napery. The General's wide-flung invitations were as widely accepted; and not alone the Van Burens and the Krudeners and the Vaughns, but the Calhouns and the Berriens and the Branches, and all of the sept of Nullification, were there, as though to put down any surmise of sulky fear for themselves to be the offshoot of that conflict of the toasts. Even the frivolous Pigeon-breast was with us undismayed; albeit he practiced a forbearance touching Peg, and never once after the first formalities so far forgot his caution as to be near enough to that sparkling lady to court the awful hazard of her glance. There came but one clash beneath my notice, and that would feed my humor. Houston was just come into town, as rude and tangled a gentleman in every politer technicality as the bears of his native woods. With him for his table-mate he bore away the wife of Ingham of the Treasury. Houston guarded his prize to her place with a ferocious backwoods vigilance as though it were indeed the enemy's country and they in peril of some Indian ambuscade with each new room they entered. The lady, with a tact as crude as Houston's knowledge of the drawing-room, perceiving the savageries of her protector, would be prompt to establish herself as directress' of his manners. Poor Houston suffered more than once the humiliation of the lady's counsel, given in a high, obvious voice, and with the manner of one who corrects a novice dull to the confines of despair. The rupture befell over fish and when a portion of delicate pompano was placed before the headlong Houston. “That is not the fish fork,” cautioned the lady in a whisper so loud it bred a smile on thirty faces either side of her; “that is not the fish fork; here, take this.” “By Satan's hoofs, madam!” exclaimed the wrathful Houston, whose long-stifled resentment would now be in the saddle, at the same time brandishing the huge trident he had somehow gotten hold on; “by Satan's hoofs! keep your fish forks for whom you will. For myself, I'll eat this catfish with my saber if I have the mind.” Later I heard the distempered lady confide to a neighbor how Houston was “an untaught brute,” while that hurt hero told me on his word as a man that for those several hours he was in her company, he had less of ease than at the Horseshoe where he was given four wounds. The East Room, when agile ones would dance was brilliant in white and gold and crystal chandeliers, with floor of water-soaked oak so polished it reflected the gay dresses like a looking-glass, and so slippery that clumsy ones, like myself, went gingerly about it in terror for their bones.