"This _is_ an unexpected pleasure!" exclaimed the New-Yorker. "I never thought to see you here, and you, I presume didn't expect to see me." Ashburner explained his mishap. "Well, I meant to go straight over to Ravenswood after the ball, but we had to come home--all of us this time--on business. Lots of French furniture arrived for our town house. Mrs. B. couldn't rest till she had seen it all herself, and had it properly arranged. So here have I been five days, fussing, and paying, and swearing (legally, you understand, not profanely) at the custom-house, and then 'hazing'--what you call slanging upholsterers; and now that the work is all over, I mean to take a little play, and am just going over to see Lady Suffolk and Trustee trot on the island. Come along. It's a beautiful drive of eight miles, and I have a top-wagon. It is to meet me at the Park in a quarter of an hour." Ashburner assented. "I want to buy some cigars; you have no objection to accompany me a moment." So they turned down one of the cross-streets running out of the lower part of Broadway (which, it may be here mentioned, for the benefit of English readers and writers, is not called _the_ Broadway), and entered a store five or six stories high, with two or three different firms on each floor; and Benson led the way up something between a ladder and a staircase into a small office, with "Bleecker Brothers" dimly visible on a tin plate over the door. Three-fourths of the apartment were filled up with all manner of inviting samples, every wine, liquor, and liqueur under the sun, in every variety of bottle or vial, thick with the dust of years, or open for immediate tasting; and through the dingy panes of a half glass door a multitudinous array of bottles might be seen loading the numerous shelves of a large store-room beyond. In a small clearing at one corner, where a small desk was kept in countenance by a small table, and three or four old chairs, with a background of shelves groaning under the choicest brands of the fragrant weed, sat the presiding deities of the place--the two little Bleeckers--the dark brother of thirty-five, and the light brother of twenty, like two sketches of the same man in chalk and charcoal; both elegantly dressed--white trousers, patent leather shoes, exuberant cravats, massive chains, and all the usual paraphernalia of young New-York--altogether looking as much in place as a couple of butterflies in an ant-hill. "Good morning, gentlemen," said Benson. "Here's our friend Ashburner," and he pushed forward the Englishman. The brothers rose, laid down the morning journals over which they had been lounging, and welcomed the stranger to their place of business. "What's the news this morning?" "Nothing at all, I believe," replied the elder. "South Carolina has been threatening to dissolve the Union again--and that's no news. Stay, did you see this about Bishop Hughes and Sam Thunderbolt, the Native American member of Congress from Pennsylvania?"