At a cross-table, behind a huge candelabra, shedding a refulgent light on her features, and in front of a sideboard piled with rich plate and burnished trenchers, till she seemed literally enshrined in gold, sat the Queen, with the most distinguished of her nobility on either hand. Her face was radiant with animation, for pomp and pleasure were not without their charms to her impressible nature; and her manner, as her guests could not but observe, combined inimitably the cordiality of the hostess with the dignity of the sovereign. Her Maries were placed at the adjoining tables, and more fortunate than their mistress, had at least the chance of sitting next those individuals in whose conversation they took especial pleasure. These lotteries, however, are very apt to turn up an unreasonable proportion of blanks, and while Mary Carmichael could not even see where Walter Maxwell was supping, and Mistress Beton, to her dismay, found herself placed three seats off from the English Ambassador, Mary Hamilton alone saw the seat next her occupied by the person whose society she liked best in the world, and none but herself knew how she trembled when her cup was filled by the poet Chastelâr. Is it not always so? We take incalculable pains to prepare for our festivities; how anxious we are that they should _go off_ well; how engrossed is the butler with his plate-basket and his ice-pail; how concerned the host that my lord’s venison should not be overdone. Every plait must be laid to a hair’s-breadth in the glistening tresses of the lady of the house. Two mirrors satisfy her, at last, that folds and flounces and flowers are still adjusted to a nicety, but still there weighs on her mind the list of precedence, and the probable contingency that the most important guest may not turn up at all. Perhaps it may come across even her conventional mind that there are games for which it is scarce worth while to purchase such expensive candles, and that a two o’clock dinner with the children is a more agreeable repast, after all. Ay! even at the best, there is a speck on the _épergne_, an earwig in the flower-basket, a flavour of wormwood in the liquid amber called champagne. _Surgit amari_ over and over again! Perhaps it was not so in that banquet of which the halt and the maimed and the blind were invited to partake. Perhaps there are no insects in a dinner of herbs; no heart-burnings in the crust we share with hunger; no bitter drop in that cup, though it be but cold water, wherewith we pledge celestial charity, and ‘entertain an angel unawares.’