How the antis and the hurrah-boys settled the affair among them, I did not care to inquire. I was engrossed by the novelties and charms of a new being, and willing to forget that such a poor devil as Sheppard Lee had ever existed. CHAPTER V. THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WORD PODAGRA. Let the reader judge of my transport, when my elegant new barouche and splendid pair of horses, that cost me a thousand dollars, drew up before my house in Chestnut-street. I stood upon the kerb-stone and surveyed it from top to bottom. The marble of the steps, basement, and window-sills was white as snow, and the bricks were redder than roses. The windows were of plate glass, and within them were curtains of crimson damask, fronted with hangings of white lace, as fine and lovely as a bride's veil of true Paris blonde; and a great bouquet of dahlias, wreathed around a blooming rose, glittered in each. It was evidently the house of a man of wealth and figure. The neighbourhood, it was equally manifest, was of the highest vogue and distinction: on one side was the dwelling of a fashionable tailor, who built a house out of every ten coats that he cut; on the other side was the residence of a retired tavern-keeper; and right opposite, on the other side of the street, was the mansion of one of the first aristocrats in the town, who had had neither a tailor nor a tavern-keeper in the family for a space of three full generations. There was no end to the genteel people in my neighbourhood; here was the house of a firstrate lawyer, there of a shop-keeper who had not sold any thing by retail for ten years; here a Croesus of a carpenter who turned up his nose at the aristocrat, and there a Plutus of a note-shaver who looked with contempt on the gentleman of chips. In short, my house was in a highly fashionable neighbourhood; and I felt, as I mounted my marble steps, that Jack Higginson, the brewer (as my brother Tim always called me), was as genteel a fellow among them as you would find of a summer's day. I entered the house as proud as Lucifer, telling my friends that they should crack a bottle or two of my best port; for Tim had given me a hint that my cellar contained some of the best in the world. "And," said Tim, giving me a wink, "we may take our fun now, as sister Margaret--" at that name I felt a cold creeping in my bones--"as sister Margaret is still in the country." The ague left me--"I did not think it," he continued, "worth while to alarm her." "The Lord be thanked!" said I; though _why_ I said it, I knew no more than the man in the moon. We sat down, we drank, and we made merry--that is to say, _they_ made merry: as for myself, a circumstance occurred which nipped my pleasure in the bud, and began to make me doubt whether, in exchanging the condition of Sheppard Lee for that of John H. Higginson, I had not made somewhat of a bad bargain.