within them, which look into the court, contain the bed-rooms, boudoir, eating-rooms, and perhaps the library. So tenacious are those, who lay any claim to gentility here, of the use of the ante-chambers, that I scarcely recollect a lodging of any sort, beyond the solitary chamber of some student, without, at least, one. They seem indispensable, and I think rightly, to all ideas of style, or even of comfort. I remember to have seen an amusing instance of the strength of this feeling in the case of the wife of a former French minister, at Washington. The building she inhabited was one of the ordinary American double houses, as they are called, with a passage through the centre, the stairs in the passage, and a short corridor, to communicate with the bed-rooms above. Off the end of this upper corridor, if, indeed, so short a transverse passage deserves the name, was partitioned a room of some eight feet by ten, as a bed-room. A room adjoining this, was converted into a boudoir and bed-room, for Madame de ----, by means of a silk screen. The usual door of the latter opened, of course, on the passage. In a morning call one day, I was received in the boudoir. Surprised to be carried up stairs on such an occasion, I was still more so to find myself taken through a small room, before I was admitted to the larger. The amount of it all was; that Madame de ----, accustomed to have many rooms, and to think it vulgar to receive in her great drawing-room of a morning, believing _au premier_, or up one pair of stairs, more genteel than the _rez de chaussee_, or the ground floor, and feeling the necessity of an ante-chamber as there was an abruptness in being at once admitted into the presence of a lady from a staircase, a sort of local _brusquerie_, that would suit her cook better than the wife of an envoy extraordinary, had contrived to introduce her guests through the little bed-room, at the end of the upstairs entry!