What gossips we women are, to be sure! I meant to write you about our new livery and I am afraid I have tired you out already. You remember when you were here, I said that I meant to have a livery, for my sister Margaret told me that when they used to drive in Hyde Park, with the old Marquis of Mammon, it was always so delightful to hear him say, “Ah! there is Lady Lobster’s livery.” It was so aristocratic. And in countries where certain colors distinguish certain families, and are hereditary, so to say, it is convenient and pleasant to recognize a coat-of-arms, or a livery, and to know that the representative of a great and famous family is passing by. “That’s a Howard, that’s a Eussell, that’s a Dorset, that’s de Colique, that’s Mount Ague,” old Lord Mammon used to say as the carriages whirled by. He knew none of them personally, I believe, except de Colique and Mount Ague, but then it was so agreeable to be able to know their liveries. Now why shouldn’t we have the same arrangement? Why not have the Smith colors, and the Brown colors, and the Black colors, and the Potiphar colors, etc., so that the people might say, “Ah! there goes the Potiphar arms.” There is one difficulty, Mr. P. says, and that is, that he found five hundred and sixty-seven Smiths in the Directory, which might lead to some confusion. But that was absurd, as I told him, because everybody would know which of the Smiths was able to keep a carriage, so that the livery would be recognized directly the moment that any of the family were seen in a carriage. Upon which he said, in his provoking way, “Why have any livery at all, then?” and he persisted in saying that no Smith was ever _the_ Smith for three generations, and that he knew at least twenty, each of whom was able to set up his carriage and stand by his colors. “But then a livery is so elegant and aristocratic,” said I, “and it shows that a servant is a servant.” That last was a strong argument, and I thought Mr. P. would have nothing to say against it; but he rattled on for some time, asking me what right I had to be aristocratic, or, in fact, anybody else;--went over his eternal old talk about aping foreign habits, as if we hadn’t a right to adopt the good usages of all nations, and finally said that the use of liveries among us was not only a “pure peacock absurdity,” as he called it, but that no genuine American would ever ask another to assume a menial badge. “Why!” said I, “is not an American servant a servant still?”