'Miss Liner was of a good family: her pa, a retired merchant, with some tincture of the humanities, and she herself well educated; that is, she knew enough Italian to say _pesch'e_; enough German for '_es ist warm_;' and enough French for '_Oh, vee_.' Music she loved to distraction. True, she sometimes nodded at a concert, but then it was only to beat the time, and when awakened by a crash, she would shake her head in languid ecstasy, and sigh out a sentimental '_ah!_' Or, if the nature of the air required it, she could shout in a voice sonorous as a cricket's: '_Divine!_' '_magnifique!_' '_grandioso!_' or the hardest word she might remember out of any language. The gentlemen in waiting caught the cue; and men who had not ear enough to keep time when dancing, were unintelligibly scientific in _allegros_ and _andantes_, and made frequent and familiar allusions to Hummel, Meyerbeer, Beethoven, and Weber. We ourselves must plead guilty of claiming an acquaintance where we never had an introduction. How true is that saying of Fuller: 'The best of God's children have a smack of hypocrisy!' Miss Catherine's papa Silas was rich, and Miss Catherine was fashionable. She came out and offered a book-muslin view of herself to two hundred and fifty warm people. Bouquets, ay, double-bouquets, were sent her by insane beaux, by means of which young gentlemen who only knew two ladies in the room were converted into flower-stands for an hour or two, trying to look easy and at home, by gently rubbing the camelias against their noses from time to time. And when Miss Catherine had given a ball herself, then did she become perfect in manner; then handled she her fan with consummate dexterity, and adopted an expression of intense fashionable agony when a badly-dressed woman passed by, or a clumsy _Unshuffleshankian_ waltzer ran against her. Then sighed she in German to a gentleman from Connecticut, lisped in French to a dandy from Philadelphia, and whispered in Tuscan to her Italian master, if he happened to be within hail. Then waltzed she with young men, warm or cold, dry or moist; she would have taken a turn with a steaming tea-kettle, if tea-kettles wore white vests and _valsed_. Then danced she like a Bacchante, and only left the ball-room just before the lights; while melancholy Silas, pining for his pillow, clasped his hands and sometimes muttered, 'Ultima July;' and sometimes, as if desparing of rest below, '_in coelo quies_.' To have seen Miss Catherine Julia, you would have sworn that she was a descendant of Lord Lanesboro', _si passionné pour la danse,_ who, after the death of Prince George of Denmark, waited upon Queen Anne, and advised her to take a quarter, by way of consolation. Let us pause a while to take breath. FORGET-ME-NOT: 'MYOSOTIS AVENSIS.' FROM THE GERMAN: BY FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. I.