The maternal girl smiled grimly at the fragile suppliant, and asked: "How much is his celery, _ma petite_?" "Nine hundred, mamma, in the Third Auditor's." "Then tell him, _mon ange_, that you are engaged for the next set, and wait until the thousand-dollar clerks come in. You know, _ma petite_, what the Count Pistachio said to you at Avignon about giving encouragement to anything less than four figures." I could not avoid overhearing this conversation, my boy, for it was not held in whispers, and I thought to myself, as I eyed the fashionable pair, "The Republic still lives." It is, however, with the foreign embassies at Washington, that the genuine aristocratic spirit still holds its normal own; and when I lately received an invitation from a certain convivial diplomatist of the Set to be one of a select party of distinguished gentlemen at his residence on a certain evening, I felt that there was still an available balm in Gilead. Arriving in the rooms shortly before ten o'clock, I found seven middle-aged gentlemen in cambric ruffles and scratch-wigs assembled around the wine-table, all pledging the health of the Venerable Gammon, who had come up from Mugville expressly to be present. There was the French Marquis Non Puebla, on a visit to this country to search for traces of one of the lost gravies of Apicius; Milord Gurgle, who had been deputed to convey to New York a pair of Southdown sheep, presented by the Zoological Gardens to Central Park; the Honorable Peter Pidger, who had once been to Europe to negotiate the sale of some railroad stock; the Ambassador in person; and three other respectable persons with no names, whose sole duty it was to indorse the Ambassador whenever he said anything about "dat signeeficant commencement of dees war at Bool Run." But the greatest of them all, my boy, was the Venerable Gammon, who smiled fatly as they drank his health, and emptied his own crystal with a soft benignity which seemed to consecrate that brand of liquor forever. "My friends," says the Venerable Gammon, waving an unctuous hand around the board in a manner to confer blessings on the very nutcrackers,--"my friends, I accept the honor for my country, and not for myself. Your countries bask in the sunshine of a powerful peace, while mine grows weak in despotic war. But do not spit upon us, my friends; do not crush us. We will do whatever you want us to do. War," says the Venerable Gammon, beaming thoughtfully at the nearest wine-cooler,--"war may be called the temporary weakness of a young country like ours; and if we learn not to value peace more than war as we grow older, it will only be because we do not learn to value war less than peace as we advance to riper years."