Back of the Cabinet stood the Foreign Ministers, bereft of their court attire, but glittering with decorations. Tall Lady Thornton bent like a reed in the blast; and Madame Flores, the beautiful young wife of the Minister from Equador, glowed in her warm rich beauty, even at zero. Alas! that all those wondrous tints of blue and gold, of royal purple and emerald, of lavender and rose, all the gleam of those diamonds, all the show of necks and arms, which was to have made the glory of this “court circle,” alas! that they were all held in eclipse, by layers on layers of wrappings, till, at a little distance, the whole platform seemed to be filled with a crowd of animated mummies, set upright, whose motions were as spasmodic and jerky as those of Mrs. Jarley’s wax works. It was very sensible—the only refuge from certain death—that all those necks and arms, diamonds, pearls, velvets and satins, should hide away under ermine capes, cloaks and shawls; but, lumped in aggregate, they did not make a pretty picture (the wraps, I mean). Indeed, the polar wave submerged the presidential platform, and made anything but a picturesque success. And how unlucky, when for the first time in the history of inauguration balls, there was a “cubby” for every hat and wrap, that every man and woman should be obliged to keep them on. But why a “presidential platform,” and why a private presidential “supper room” at an inauguration ball? Both are vulgarly pretentious. Both are preposterous, in the representatives of a republican people, in a national assembly. I am not a universal leveller. I respect the inevitable distinctions begotten of personal taste and condition. I make this remark to add a little force to my protest against meretricious, and fictitious pretence and shams. The President, as an individual, is not under the slightest obligation to invite anybody that he does not want, to his private dinner table. But when the President, _as_ the President, comes into the presence of a promiscuous assembly of the people, through whose gift he holds all the honor he possesses,—a citizen uplifted by citizens to the chief magistracy of their government, how false to republican fact is the feeling that perches him up, and hedges him about, with a mock heroic exclusiveness, as if he were a king, or demi-god, instead of a stolid tanner, who fought his way to place and power, conferred on him by a nation of stavers and fighters like himself. CHAPTER XXIX. THE UNITED STATES TREASURY—ITS HISTORY.