than might have been bestowed upon a very ungraceful lay-figure carried around for the showing off of modes and millinery. All this in thirty hours; and all this was certainly enough to disturb more equable pulses than those which beat under the coarse red skin of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame. And when, that night while the moon was high in heaven and nearly all the guests had left parlor and piazza to silence after such an eventful day--while poor Marianna in her chamber wept over the cruel neglect which had made mockery of all her rosy anticipations, and Master Brooks Brooks moaned out at her side his petulant complaints born of ill-breeding, fright and weakness,--when Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame opened upon her not-yet-sobered husband the battery of her tongue, and accused him of being the author of all the mishaps before named, those with which he had nothing to do quite as much as those in which he had been really instrumental,--then and there, for the moment, the Nemesis of the outraged republic was duly asserting the power delegated to her by the gods, and Shoddy, in the person of one of its humblest representatives, was undergoing a slight foretaste of that eternal torture to be hereafter enforced. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, on that occasion, declared her intention of not remaining another day among "such low people," and she further intimated to Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that if he did not learn to behave himself in a manner more becoming to his high position (or at least the high position of his wife and children!) she would "take him home at once and never bring him out agin into respectable society while her head was warrum." At the end of which exordium the berated husband not unnaturally remarked, in a brogue nearly as broad as it had ever been: "And fwhat the divil did ye come trapesin here for at all at all? Ye'd be doin' well enough at home, if ye'd only sthay there, Bridget--I mane Julia. Ye'r no more fit to be kapin company wid dhe quality, nor meself; and I'm as much out of place here as a pig 'ud be goin' to mass! Sure Mary Ann 'il niver be gettin' a husband among these people wid dhe turned-up noses, and poor little Pat'll be dhrouned and kilt and murthered intirely! You'd betther be gettin' out of this as soon as ye can, and I'd be savin' me hard-earned money!" "The money you have cheated for, ye mane, Pat Cunningham," said Mrs. Brooks, who when alone with the object of her devoted affection and in a temper the reverse of amiable, could unveil some of the household skeletons of language and history quite as readily as he. "Pretty things them was that ye sold for horses to the government! and there's a good dale of the money ye made when ye was Alderman, that they'd send ye to the State Prison for if they knowed all about it!"