Contrast this, my dear Molly, with one of our little miserable subscription balls at home, where Dan Cassidy, the dancing-master, is driving about the country, for maybe three weeks, in his old gig, before he can scrape together a matter of six or seven pounds, to pay for mutton lights, two fiddles, and a dulcimer; and, after all, it's perhaps over the Bridewell we 'd be dancing, and the shouts of the dirty creatures below would be coming up at every pause of the music. Now, here, it's like a royal palace,--elegant lustres, with two hundred wax-lights in each of them,--a floor like glass. Ask Mary Anne if it isn't as slippery! The dress of the company actually magnificent! none of your little shabby-colored muslins, or Limerick lace; none of your gauze petticoats, worn over glazed calico, to look like satin, but everything real, Molly,--the lace, the silk, the satin, the jewels, the gold trimmings, the feathers,--all the best of the kind, and fresh as they came out of the shop. You don't see the white satin shoes with the mark of a man's foot on them, nor the satin body with four fingers and a thumb on the back of it, as you would at a Patrick's Ball in Dublin! Everything is new for each night. How Mary Anne laughs at the Irish notions of dress, of what they call in the "Evening Post," "a beautiful lama petticoat over a white satin slip!" or "a train of elegant figured tabinet." Why, Molly darling, you might as well wear a mackintosh, or go out in a suit of glazed alpaca cloth. Mary Anne says that the ball at the Castle of Dublin is like a tournament, where all the company dance in armor; and, indeed, when I think of the rattling of bead bracelets, false pearls, and Berlin necklaces, it rather reminds me of a hornpipe in fetters! I must confess to you, Molly, there 's nothing as low anywhere as Dublin, and latterly, when anybody asks Mary Anne or me if it's pleasant, we always say with a strong English accent, "Our military friends say, vastly, but we really don't know ourselves." Is n't that a pretty pass to be reduced to? But I 'm told that all the Irish, of any distinction, are obliged to do the same, and never confess to have seen more of Ireland than one does from the Welsh mountains. It's no want of patriotism makes me say this. I wish, with all my heart, that Ireland was a perfect paradise; and it's no fault of mine that Providence intended otherwise. If I was n't writing with my head so full of Tom Purcell and his late impudence, I 'd have plenty to tell you about the girls and James. Mary Anne is more admired than any girl here, and so would Cary, if she 'd only let herself be so; but she has got a short, snubby, tart kind of way with people, that never goes down abroad, where, as Lord G. says, "every cat plays with his claws covered."