the fashion; to build houses thirty feet broad, as if they were palaces;
to furnish them with all the luxurious devices of Parisian genius; to
give superb banquets, at which your guests laugh, and which make you
miserable; to drive a fine carriage and ape European liveries, and
crests, and coats-of-arms; to resent the friendly advances of your
baker's wife, and the lady of your butcher (you being yourself a
cobbler's daughter); to talk much of the "old families" and of your
aristocratic foreign friends; to despise labor; to prate of "good
society"; to travesty and parody, in every conceivable way, a society
which we know only in books and by the superficial observation of
foreign travel, which arises out of a social organization entirely
unknown to us, and which is opposed to our fundamental and essential
principles; if all this were fine, what a prodigiously fine society
would ours be!

This occurred to us upon lately receiving a card of invitation to a
brilliant ball. We were quietly ruminating over our evening fire, with
Disraeli's Wellington speech, "all tears," in our hands, with the
account of a great man's burial, and a little man's triumph across the
channel. So many great men gone, we mused, and such great crises
impending! This democratic movement in Europe; Kossuth and Mazzini
waiting for the moment to give the word; the Russian bear watchfully
sucking his paws; the Napoleonic empire redivivus; Cuba, and annexation,
and Slavery; California and Australia, and the consequent considerations
of political economy; dear me! exclaimed we, putting on a fresh hodful
of coal, we must look a little into the state of parties.

As we put down the coal-scuttle, there was a knock at the door. We said,
"come in," and in came a neat Alhambra-watered envelope, containing the
announcement that the queen of fashion was "at home" that evening week.